OMAHA, Neb. - Sep 3

 

As they wait for a national storage site to be built, Nebraska's two nuclear power plants are expanding their on-site storage systems for used fuel.

Nebraska Public Power District is spending $45 million and the Omaha Public Power District $23 million on the first phase of expanded storage systems for the high-level radioactive waste, the utilities said.

Expansion already is under way at OPPD's Fort Calhoun plant. Work at NPPD's Cooper Nuclear Station is a few years away.

Other nuclear plants are expanding their storage systems because they are running out of room in what were originally to be transitional storage systems.

The federal government had hoped to build a single national storage site in Nevada, but scientific and political controversy have set back the project by about 20 years. That site is projected to last 10,000 years.

It will be at least 2017 before the Yucca Mountain site could begin taking fuel. By then, the nation's nuclear plants will have generated more waste than Yucca Mountain is licensed to store.

OPPD spokesman Jeff Hanson said the utility plans to spend a total of $43 million for its long-term storage system at Fort Calhoun.

Cost estimates for NPPD's Cooper plant near Brownville were not available.

When the nation's nuclear plants were built decades ago, the federal government committed to taking care of the spent fuel.

The material remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.

Rod McCullum of the Nuclear Energy Institute trade association said he expects a couple of solutions to nuclear waste.

McCullum said he believes Yucca Mountain eventually will open and that it will be expanded. He said the federal government also will permit reuse of nuclear waste someday.

Within 20 years, McCullum said, nuclear plants should see their growing stock of used fuel begin to diminish.

The OPPD and NPPD plants' original storage facilities are deep pools of water that shield people from radiation but require heavy maintenance. Continuously recirculated, the water removes some of the intense heat coming off the fuel rods.

These pools are considered at greater risk of catastrophe than the long-term storage systems, in which fuel bundles are encased in steel barrels surrounded by concrete. Air movement around the barrels passively cools the waste.

Representatives of both utilities say they have no intention of turning their nuclear campuses into permanent storage sites for their waste.

___

Information from: Omaha World-Herald, http://www.omaha.com