National Academies Press: OpenBook

Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage: Public Report (2006)

Chapter: D.2.2 Effect of Reversal of U.S. Fuel Reprocessing Policy

« Previous: D.1 DESIGN FOR A CLOSED FUEL CYCLE
Suggested Citation:"D.2.2 Effect of Reversal of U.S. Fuel Reprocessing Policy." National Research Council. 2006. Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage: Public Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11263.
×

several consecutive locations to obtain maximum economic use of the fuel before it was finally removed as waste. The USNRC changed the legal definition of high-level radioactive waste to include the high-level waste from both nuclear fuel reprocessing and spent nuclear fuel.

For this study, the significance of this closed fuel cycle design is that this entire generation of more than 100 reactors was designed with small spent fuel pools, relying on prompt shipment away from the reactor to the reprocessing plant to make room for later discharges of spent fuel. Early spent fuel shipping casks were being designed with active cooling systems to support shipment of fuel less than a year out of the reactor to a reprocessing plant. BOX D.1 discusses the spent nuclear fuel at reprocessing plants. Supplementary wet and dry storage systems had to be developed to receive the older spent fuel to make room for fresh spent fuel from the reactor. Many plants had to remove and modify the storage racks in their spent fuel pools to accommodate more spent fuel in the pool itself until licensed supplementary systems were available.

D.2 RETRENCHMENT OF U.S. REACTOR PLANS

As noted in Section D.1, in the 1970s the United States was building reactors at a high rate. Then, in the late 1970s, three factors produced a retrenchment in power reactor plans: rising interest rates, reversal of the U.S. fuel reprocessing policy, and the Three Mile Island-2 accident.

D.2.1 Effect of Interest Rates

Commercial power reactors have characteristically high initial capital costs. The regulated public utilities have had to raise the capital with various debt instruments; to build, license, and operate the finished plant for a time before it can be declared commercial; and to change the electricity rates charged consumers to retire the debt on the capital cost. The soaring interest rates in the United States during the late 1970s drove the costs of new nuclear plants that were under construction to extreme heights. This, combined with slackening demand for electricity, led to the cancellation of many plants, some even in advanced stages of construction.

D.2.2 Effect of Reversal of U.S. Fuel Reprocessing Policy

President Carter enunciated a change in U.S. policy for reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel in early 1977. Those reactors then operating and those under construction had to begin modifying their reactor fuel cycle design to go from the closed (reprocessing) cycle to a “once-through” fuel cycle. This induced the designers to go to higher levels of uranium-235 enrichment in the new fuel, but still within the 5 percent licensing limit. It also induced the designers to revise the core loading and operating plans in order to burn or use the fissile content of the fuel to the greatest extent economically possible since the fissile residue could not be retrieved by reprocessing. As a result, spent fuel burnup levels rose to levels that are now almost double the 20–30 GWd/MTU characteristic of the original closed fuel cycle. This results in an increase in the decay-heat power of the spent fuel assembly by the time it is put into the spent fuel pool.

Suggested Citation:"D.2.2 Effect of Reversal of U.S. Fuel Reprocessing Policy." National Research Council. 2006. Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage: Public Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11263.
×

BOX D.1
Spent Fuel at Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Plants

Up until the mid-1970s the commercial nuclear industry was expected to operate several nuclear fuel reprocessing plants to recover fissile plutonium from virtually all of the commercial spent fuel from U.S. reactors. These plants would use aqueous reprocessing methods developed by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The recovered plutonium was to be used as mixed oxide fuel (PuO2 and UO2) in water reactors and, later, as fuel in breeder reactors. Each reprocessing plant had one or two storage pools to receive and store the fuel temporarily until it was reprocessed. No long-term storage of the spent fuel from commercial reactors was planned. Only two commercial reprocessing sites have received spent fuel, West Valley, New York, and G.E.-Morris, Illinois,

The first commercial reprocessing plant began operations by the Nuclear Fuel Services Company on a site in West Valley, New York, owned by the State of New York. The State of New York licensed a low-level radioactive waste disposal site adjacent to the reprocessing plant. The West Valley plant had a reprocessing capacity of about 1 metric ton of uranium (MTU) per day. It operated at reduced capacity because there was not yet much commercial spent fuel to reprocess. In fact, about half of the spent fuel reprocessed there was from the last in the series of plutonium production reactors, the N-Reactor, at the AEC site in Hartford, Washington. This spent fael was provided to the West Valley plant to keep it working in the early days when little commercial spent fuel was available. The West Valley plant suspended operations in 1972 in order to expand its capacity to about 3 MTU per day. The work and the re-licensing effort went on until 1976 when the company withdrew its application for the new license and terminated reprocessing operations. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) took over the task of high-level radioactive waste retrieval and decommissioning under the West Valley Demonstration Project Act of 1980. About 137 MTU of commercial spent fuel remaining in the cooling pool was returned to its owners (USNRC, 1987). In 2003 the last of this spent fuel, about 25 MTU in two shipping casks, was shipped to the DOE-ldaho National Lab where it remains in dry storage in those casks.

The General Electric Company built a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at Morris. Illinois, near the Dresden Nuclear Power Station. The plant was expected to reprocess 3 MTU per day. When the G.E.-Morris plant was in its final testing in 1975, the company determined that its performance would not be acceptable without extensive modifications. The request for a reprocessing plant operating license was withdrawn and the plant was licensed only to possess the spent nuclear fuel that it was under contract to reprocess. After modifying the storage system in its below-grade pool to hold more spent fuel, G.E.-Morris has received and stores 700 MTU of spent fuel for various owners.

Power reactors are refueled, and spent fuel is discharged to the storage pool, every one to two years. The decay-heat power of recently discharged spent fuel dominates the heat load of all the spent fuel in the pool, both freshly discharged and old, since the decay heat from a spent fuel assembly decreases by one to two orders of magnitude in the first year after it is removed from the reactor increasing the capacity of the spent fuel pool by reracking, that is, modifying the storage racks to provide for closer spacing of the fuel assemblies,1 allows older fuel to be accumulated in the pool rather than being removed for

1  

The capacity of spent fuel pools has typically been increased by replacing the original storage racks with racks that hold the spent fuel assemblies closer together. The fuel assembly channels in these

Suggested Citation:"D.2.2 Effect of Reversal of U.S. Fuel Reprocessing Policy." National Research Council. 2006. Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage: Public Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11263.
×
Page 101
Suggested Citation:"D.2.2 Effect of Reversal of U.S. Fuel Reprocessing Policy." National Research Council. 2006. Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage: Public Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11263.
×
Page 102
Next: D.3.1 Pressurized Water Reactors »
Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage: Public Report Get This Book
×
Buy Paperback | $41.00
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
Download Free PDF

In response to a request from Congress, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Homeland Security sponsored a National Academies study to assess the safety and security risks of spent nuclear fuel stored in cooling pools and dry casks at commercial nuclear power plants. The information provided in this book examines the risks of terrorist attacks using these materials for a radiological dispersal device. Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel is an unclassified public summary of a more detailed classified book. The book finds that successful terrorist attacks on spent fuel pools, though difficult, are possible. A propagating fire in a pool could release large amounts of radioactive material, but rearranging spent fuel in the pool during storage and providing emergency water spray systems would reduce the likelihood of a propagating fire even under severe damage conditions. The book suggests that additional studies are needed to better understand these risks. Although dry casks have advantages over cooling pools, pools are necessary at all operating nuclear power plants to store at least the recently discharged fuel. The book explains it would be difficult for terrorists to steal enough spent fuel to construct a significant radiological dispersal device.

  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    Switch between the Original Pages, where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  9. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!