ML20154N581
| ML20154N581 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Issue date: | 08/01/1977 |
| From: | Gossick L NRC OFFICE OF THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR FOR OPERATIONS (EDO) |
| To: | |
| References | |
| TASK-TF, TASK-URFO NUDOCS 9810220027 | |
| Download: ML20154N581 (15) | |
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Statement of Lee V. Gossick Executive Director for Operations U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Before the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations August 1,1977 -
MR. CHAIRMAN AND MEMBERS OF THE SUBCOMMITTEE, I am pleased to present to you the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's assessment of the storage requirements and the industry's storage capacity for used or
" spent" fuel from nuclear power plants. But first, I would like to outline the origin of and the responsibilities of the NRC.
Responsibilities of the NRC_
The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 charged the Atomic Energy Commission with the mission of developing the peaceful uses of nuclear energy consistent with the common defense and security and with the health and safety of the public. In 1970 the National Environmental Policy l
Act (NEPA) enlarged the AEC's regulatory responsibility by requiring evaluation of nonradiological as well as radiological impacts on the .
environment of major nuclear facilities proposed for licensing. In so doing, this Act requires the benefits of such facilities to be balanced against their envircnmental and social costs.
Subsequently, the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 abolished the AEC and created the NRC as an independent agency to administer nuclear regulation and the Energy Research and Development Administra-tion to carry out research and development on all forms of energy.
Under provisions of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended, the Energy Reorganization Act and NEPA, the NRC regulates civilian nuclear 9810220027 770801 PDR ORO NE E e o vvJ l
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energy activities to protect the public health and safety and the environment, maintain national security, and ensure compliance with the antitrust laws. To fulfill these responsibilities, the NRC maintains broad programs of standards setting and rule making, technical reviews and studies, licensing actions, inspection and enforcement activities, evaluation of operating experience, and regulatory research.
In the one area of the civilian nuclear industry that I am
. addressing,today -- spent fuel storage -- the changes in perception of peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and changes in laws, policies and practices governing those uses have resulted in an industry posture very different from that anticipated in earlier years.
Accordingly, I plan to direct my remarks to three areas:
-- First, to review the evolution of spent fuel management practices; .
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-- Second, to assess the situation as it exists today and the sctions indust,ry is taking to resolve needs for l spent fue' stc-age; and
-- Third, to outline actions that are underway at NRC to be responsive to both present needs of industry and ;
potential needs through the remainder of this century.
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L 7 o o Historical Planning and Practice '
Used or' spent fuel discharged from light-water-cooled power rea~ctors contains significant quantities of fissile material--both. uranium and plutonium. F' rom the early days of nuclear power development, electric utilities constructing light-water-cooled nuclear power reactors planned ;
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. that the . spent fuel discharged from the reactors would be chemically ;
reprocessed to recover the unused fissile materials; and that the l l
recovered materials would be recycled back into fresh reactor. fuel.
It was contemplated by the industry that spent fuel would be stored in onsite storage pools for a limited period of time to cool by permitting certain~ radioactive materials contained with the fuel to decay before- )
shipment to a reprocessing plant. I l
It was expected that shipment of the stored spent fuel away from the reactor site would begin within six to nine months after removal from the reactor. Since spent fuel would have a relatively short ,
residence time at the reactor site, limited storage capability was needed. Historically, plants have been designed with storage pools'
~ that have the capability to store fue. Jischarged during a refueling plus some.additio.ial fuel . Generally, the space for additional fuel has been sized for a full core so that if a need to unload the core should occur, space would be available to permit immediate unloading.
This extra space is called full core reserve (FCR). With an anticipated l refueling schedule which involves replacing about one-third of a core )
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. 4-yearly, the'poo1~ for a single reactor would be sized to hold one and one-third cores. ' Reactor sites with two reactors sharing a single pool usually have a capability for one and two-thirds cores. These pools. provide storage capability for about five years and three years, respectively, if-no fuel is shipped from the site and no expansion of storage capacity is made. . '
. It would be useful at this point to discuss the concept of full core reserve (FCR) in some depth. FCR has been traditionally main- i l
tained by the utilities to maximize operational flexibility. ~ FCR has l l
not been required by NRC for safety reasons since reactors are designed' I 1
to withstand even the most severe events with the fuel still in the ;
reactor vessel . Consequently, no reactor is designed to depend on I removal of its core as a safety measure. The redundant Emergency _ Core Cooling System and the high integrity of the reactor vessel provide '
' assurance that cooling and storage in the reactor vessel of the fuel is safe under all coriditions.
If an event were to occur, however, which would require or make it prudent to unload the core for inspection or repairs, the availability 1
of space-for the fuel in the pool would minimize down time of the !
reactor. If.there were no FCR, several months would be added to the
- outage while fuel was shipped offsite to make room in the pool. This I increased down time and resulting loss of. power generation would have severe effects in some cases, particularly in the incurment of economic penal ties. Safety, however, would not be compromised.
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O \O In 1957 the Government comitted itself to accepting comercial ,
spent fuel and ultimately reprocess it unless a commercial reprocessing i
facility became operational. In 1966 the comercially-operated l Nuclear Fuel Services reprocessing facility at West Valley, New York, was licensed; and by the end of 1970, the Government was no longer accepting comercial. spent fuel for storage. However, NFS shut down 1
in 1972 for alterations and expansion; and a decision not to continue reprocessing has subsequently been made by NFS. Since then, spent l fuel has accumulated in onsite storage pools and has been shipped to offsite storage basins such as those at NFS and at the General Electric I storage facility at Morris, Illinois. Originally G.E. Morris was also intended to be a reprocessing facility but design difficulties resulted in it never operating as such. Currently, Allied General Nuclear Services is seeking a license to operate a facility at Barnwell, South Carolina; and Exxon has applied for a facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
The hearings on the Generic Environmental Statement on Mixed 0xide Fuel. (GESMO) have yet to be carried to completion. The decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit prohibiting NRC from issuing any interim license for reprocessing prior to completion of GESMO is currently under review by the U.S. Supreme Court. Upon consideration of the April 7 statement by the President calling for indefinite deferral of reprocessing, the GESMO board has suspended hearings and requested guidance from the Commission. The Comission is assessing the impact of the president's statement on its activities J
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. Q O concerning the reprocessing and recycle concepts and has solicited and received public comments on reprocessing and on how to proceed with the GESMO matter. It has also solicited comment from the President.
Work is 'being done at ERDA to develop, and at NRC to review, a license application for a geologic repository for spent fuel and solidi-fled high-level waste from a reprocessing plant. Such a repository is presently targeted for completion and a licensing decision in 1985.
I have spoken of the spent fuel storage situation as it has evolved over the years and some of the uncertainties that have affected it.
. Now I would like to address the current status.
Current Status of Spent Fuel Storage In assessing applications for increasing the spent fuel storage ,
capability at reactor sites, NRC considers both safety and environmental factors. A primary safety factor is the nuclear state of spent fuel which is stored in ' racks , located in a pool of circulating cooling water.
The purpose of the racks is to secure the spent fuel in a manner to preclude nuclear criticality or nuclear fission--under all postulated conditions includi.ig operational errors, equipment failures, and natural phenomena such as earthquakes. When storage racks were first
-designed, the criticality-related calculations were not as precise as the techniques used today; no particular attempt was made for optimum use of storage basins. Storage space was not a prime concern. Pool design, including the layout of fuel storage racks, was very conservative and acceptable to the NRC staff. Currently, improved storage rack e
o o design methods have made it quite practical and safe to substantially increase the number of racks in a pool of fix'ed size.
The cost associated with adding new racks or replacing the original racks varies. Most applications for fuel pool expansion show predicted costs ranging between $1 million and $3 million. These costs include engineering, licensing, procurement of new racks, and installation.
The size of the requested increase is the licensees' choice. A proposal is made; and if review shows that it is safe, authorization may be granted. NRC does not affect the licensees' choice, no - o we review the' proposal for optimum use of space or other operatic i considerations.
During the past two years, the staff has approved 18 applications involving 23 facilities for onsite increases in storage capacity. The staff has received 11 other applications for increased capacity at sites involving 16 nuclear units. The increases range up to about -
250 percent of the original capability. As stated earlier, the requested added storage increment is an option of the particular utility.
Interfacility transfdrs, both between units at the same site and from_a reactor facility to.offsite storage, have been reviewed and approved by the NRC. At the present time the staff is reviewing the first applications for shiprrent of spent fuel from a reactor pool at
- one site to a pool at a different site.
Currently, there are 12 nuclear units located at ten different sites that do not have the spent fuel storage capacity. for a full core dis-L cha rge. As stated previously, there are no safety reasons that require l: imediate unloading of a full core,
O O Non-reactor site fuel storage adds to the practicality of any fuel storage transfer program. At the present time the General Electric facility in Illinois, with a licensed storage capacity of 700 metric tons (MT) of fuel, has an unfilled capacity of about 440 MT. This unused storage is conservatively equivalent to about five full core discharges from a moderate size nuclear electric unit--600 to 700 megawatts electric. Or, this unfilled storage capacity could accommo-date the spent fuel from about 15 reloads; this corresponds, as stated earlier, to replacing about one-third of a core during each reload which occurs about yearly, depending on plant operations. General Electric submitted recently an application to increase its storage cap'acity by 1,100 MT, which is equivalent to about 12 additional full core discharges or 36 fuel reloads.
The Nuclear Fuel Services facility could accommodate a very nominal 70 MT of additional spent fuel; however, this facility has discontinued operations. -
Currently, although not licensed, the Barnwell, South Carolina, facility has a storage pool capacity of 400 MT.
NRC Licensing Procedures The total time required to conduct a safety and environmental i
review for a new, independent spent fuel storage installation is on the order of two years. The environmental statement required by NEPA is expected to be the pacing item. This statement is based on an ind.ependent, interdisciplinary review of the applicant's proposal for j
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... . O the site selected. 'The time to perform such an appraisal varies from ,
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12 to 18 months. Since no independent storage faci 11ty, as such, has been. licensed previously, the first installation is likely to take mom time than subsequent applications. After receipt and resolution of public comments, .which is expected to' require another four or six months, a Final Environmental Statement would be issued.
Concurrent with the preparation of the environmental statement, the staff also evaluates the safety' analysis report of the applicant.
This' work is generally not on the critical path as- far as issuance of a license'is. concerned. However, should a hearing be' required, the time for. issuance of a-license might be extended.
We_have received from Stone and Webster Corporation a Topical Report for a standardized des'ign for an. independent spent fuel storage facility (1,300 MT UO2 ) which would be built on the site of a parent- _
facility such as a reactor. A generic staff review of that design -
Will be completed in Septiember. Since a site for any such storage facility would have been examined previously for a reactor having a
'far greater potential health and safety impact, and since the standard design would have been reviewed already, any specific facility to be built should requim six to eight months less time to license. Con-struction could presumably be completed in two. years or less. Thus,
- such a-standard design facility would trim time to operation from a
-total of'four to five years _to between two and three years. I might add that we expect to receive for review in September another topical report of a standard design of the same general type from the NUS Corporation, k
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Summary of Current Assessment ,
Evaluations have been made by the staff ' assuming idea.lized.
unconstrained use of the industry's spent fuel pool storage capacity.
These approaches assume solution of the nany procedural and legal problems associated with transshipping fuel between reactors of 1
different design, owned by different utilities in different states. )
i They are intended to examine the upper bounds of storage capacity '
theoretically available at existing and planned facilities. These studies used as a baseline the plants now in various stages of design, construction, and operation. This includes, in addition to the 64 units now operating, those with a construction permit, those under review for a construction permit, and those units ordered or publicly announced. These results may be summarized as follows:
- 1. Adequate storage capacity is available (that is, total industry storage capacity exceeds accumulated spent fuel
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discharged).through 1988 with no increases in onsite storage capacity. If a full core discharge reserve were to be i required with no increases in onsite storage, there would be a shortage of capacity today.
- 2. There appears to be adequate storage capacity even with a full core reserve, provided that the storage capacity at each of the unmodified units is increased by a factor of about 2.5 by installing new closer spaced fuel assembly racks.
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- 3. The currently available "away-from-reactor" storage facilities ,
do not add significant storage capacity to this idealized evaluation. They do, however, provide flexibility that may be needed for individual facilities.
These studies assume that total industrial storage capacity would be used in an optimum consolidated manner with uninhibited inter-site shippage and storage.
On the other hand, an upper bound on the storage capacity needed can be estimated by assuming no transshipment among the different utilities. Different utilities may not desire to share their storage space, and there may be other logistical and legal problems that limit the effectiveness of this approach. In our Draft Environmental
' Statement Related to Spent Fuel Handling and Storage which gives an overview of spent fuel storage for the years 1976-2000, we consider a bounding case which assumes that all reactor storage pools are modified to increase their storage capacity by a factor of 2.5 and that no transshipment of spent fuel between pools of different reactors occurs. The remaining required spent fuel storage in this case is assumed to be accomodated by away-from-reactor. storage.
l Basically, our preliminary conclusions show that throughout most 1
of this period, most spent fuel could still be stored in reactor pools. l 1
Only if no reprocessing or disposal should occur by the last decade of
. l this century could away-from-reactor storage amount to more than 20 percent of the total spent fuel stored. In such an event, that is, no l reprocessing or disposal of spent fuel by year 2000, about 41,000 metric J
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. J \n v tons would be stored in facilities other than reactors. To accomplish -
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this, about six facilities the size of the proposed Exxon reprocessing facility spent fuel pool (7,000 metric tons)' would be required.
Under the assumptions of no reprocessing or direct disposal in the near future, transportation does not seem likely to be limited by cask availability through the 1980's. It is expected that one additional rail cask per year or about eight truck casks per year I through the 1980's would suffice. We note that the latest industry study by the Atomic Industry Forum indicates that some four additional l rail casks' and some seven additional truck casks will be available in 1978. In the 1990's, production of casks would be required to increase rapidly; but with the lead time involved and the present response of industry, it seems that this potential problem will be solved. In the event that early reprocessing or operation of a geologic repository should occur, then transportation problems, partic'ularly cask ownership and availability, could become acute.
The preliminary conclusions of the Draft Environmental Statement are that the incremental tiealth and safety and environmental impacts of spent fuel storage are quite small. Indeed, no change in the
,present Table S-3, " Summary of Environmental Considerations for Uranium
. Fuel Cycle," in 10 CFR Part 51.20 will be necessary. Spent fuel storage will increase the cost of nuclear power generation by about one-half of one percent, assuming no reprocessing or disposal of the fuel .
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In summary, while individual plants will continue to experience ,
storage capacity problems over the next decade, it seems that continued
' densification of.at-reactor storage' pools and the apparent preparations by industry to construct additional away-from-reactor storage capacity.
- as' well as some shuffling of spent fuel-from one reactor pool to that of another, will prevent any serious industry problems.
'NRC Actions i NRC is acting to be responsive to the storage capacity situation.
Soon after the Draft Environmental Statement is published in August I or September, we will also issue for public comment a new rule and )
attendant regulatory guides which will provide specific requirements
. for independent spent fuel storage facilities.
We believe'that, although it will be some time before final
__ adoption of the new rule, it and regulatory guides should serve to expedite -licensing time by making requirements explicit, providing guidance on design problems' and removing ambiguities. In addition, NRC is staffing to handle the anticipated case load.
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On the related matter of waste management, until recently our !
efforts have been directed toward the licensing of the facility (i.e.,
. deep geologic) and the waste form (i.e., high-level reprocessing . waste) we expected to see in a license application from ERDA. However, we
- have been investigating the disposal (or very long-term storage) of
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spent. fuel. In the. course of two rule making proceedings--namely,
. GESMO and the so-called S-3 proceedings--it became clear to us that k
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there' was little information in the literature upon which to reach a
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reasoned decision regarding the impacts of th' e disposal of. spent fuel.
Thus, to supplement the testimonies and reports in both of these ,
proceedings,' we have begun the analysis of the management of spent fuel as a waste (the so-called " stowaway" and " throwaway" fuel cycles).
The principal data being developed to supplement our present under-t standing are the long-term actiniue inventory in the ~ repository, the
. radiological burden of these cycles, the land area requirements of l disposal of spent' fuel, and the comparison of these fuel cycles with
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the more traditionally treated recycle options.
Following the statements _of former President Ford and President Carter, and the reports of the Ford Foundation and the American Physical l Society, we have.. begun to place more emphasis in our programs on
- development of regulations for spent fuel disposal. We shall finish criteria (now well along) for the disposal of high-level reprocessing
- i waste but will accelerate the schedule for development of criteria for disposal of spent fuel--the high-level waste from the " throwaway" fuel cycle.
If it is determined that spent fuel elements should be stored or disposed of in deep geological repositories, the Commission will need
. regulations to govern such activities. The Comission will also need analytical capabilities to ascertain the safety of proposed facilities and storage / disposal methods. To meet these needs, we have expanded our standards and methodology development programs as follows to include the storage / disposal of spent fuel in waste management facilities:
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.. -. O \o 0 The program for develo' ping repository design / performance criteria and repository site suitability criteria will include the development of a data base specifically for spent fuel storage / disposal in deep geological media.
Criteria specific to spent fuel management will be pro-mulgated if shown to be necessary on the bases of these studies.
O The program for developing performance criteria for the form in which waste will be disposed will address the con-I ce'rns particular to spent fuel management, and special handling / packaging criteria will be developed as warranted.
O The safety assessment model being developed to evaluate the safety of proposed repository designs is being modified to accanmodate spent fuel risk assessments for deep geological repositories.
.This ends my prepared remarks. I would like to thank the Chairman and members of the Committee for this opportunity to provide the NRC staff views of the spent fuel storage situation this morning. I would be happy to respond to any questions. .
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