Nuclear Foes See Danger in Waste: Harris Plant Starts Relicensing Process

Nuclear Foes See Danger in Waste: Harris Plant Starts Relicensing Process

Apr 15 - The News & Observer

By John Murawski, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.

The Shearon Harris nuclear plant has long drawn scrutiny over the safety of atomic power. But safety concerns are shifting to an emerging issue: the buildup of radioactive waste at the site in volumes never anticipated when the plant began operating 20 years ago.

Longtime nuclear critics plan to highlight the nuclear waste quandary during a two-year safety review as Progress Energy seeks to extend the Shearon Harris operating license into the middle of the century. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold the first public meeting on the Shearon Harris relicensing on Wednesday in Apex.

The nuclear waste issue is gaining momentum nationwide amid growing concerns that nuclear plants are potential targets for terrorism and sabotage. With no long-term solution in sight for disposing of nuclear waste, many nuclear plants are storing three times as much waste as the temporary pools were originally expected to hold. Unlike the nuclear reactors themselves, the storage sites usually are not heavily fortified against attack.

"There's a growing recognition from the point of view of terrorism that the pools are much more vulnerable," said Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington who has studied nuclear waste security. "These pools have some of the highest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet."

Progress Energy spokesman Rick Kimble said the Shearon Harris waste pools have multiple safety backup systems and access to the water supply of Harris Lake next to the plant.

"These pools are as safe as any storage facility known to man," he said. "We have at least a dozen different methods of putting water back into that pool should you lose the primary [coolant]."

By law, relicensing hearings focus narrowly on a nuclear plant's safety components and environmental impacts as the plant ages. But critics are trying to force the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to also consider the growing risks of stockpiling radioactive waste near the country's major population centers.

Critics say Shearon Harris, about 20 miles southwest of Raleigh, has become Progress Energy's de facto regional nuclear waste depot. The site stores overflow waste from two other nuclear plants in addition to its own. The problem is compounded by the prospect of building a new reactor that would generate more radioactive waste. The site is licensed to store several dozen times as much radioactive material as the reactor core, leading to worries that a major accident involving nuclear waste could be more catastrophic than a nuclear meltdown in the reactor.

"They're going to be storing that waste for decades, and they're storing it in the most dangerous way possible," said Jim Warren, director of N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network in Durham. "The potential consequences are unmatched by any other terrorist target in the United States."

Licensing opponents around the country are not seeking to block the 20-year license extension itself but instead to force nuclear plants to thin out the waste pools and store the spent nuclear fuel in reinforced dry casks above ground, as recommended by the National Academy of Sciences and other experts.

The security issue

The academy issued a report last year confirming concerns about nuclear waste buildup. State governments have also taken up the issue, fighting relicensing attempts in Vermont, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Nine state attorneys general have asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to consider security risks during relicensing reviews.

N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper has decided to sit out the Shearon Harris relicensing proceedings because numerous appeals and petitions have already been set in motion by other states, said Cooper's spokeswoman, Noelle Talley.

Since the NRC relicensed the nation's first nuclear plant in 2000, the agency has extended nuclear licenses for 48 facilities. Storing the waste in on-site pools is approved by the NRC, which considers the practice safe. The Shearon Harris pools, for example, are equipped with multiple backup systems to keep the superheated nuclear material under water and prevent it from combusting. The building that houses the 40-foot deep pools is designed to withstand an earthquake and a hurricane. The upper walls of the pools rise above the ground, but the radioactive waste is kept below ground level, submerged under 23 feet of water.

The defense of nuclear plants, which are patrolled by armed guards, is considered separately and classified for security reasons.

NRC spokesman Scott Burnell wrote in an e-mail: "Security requirements to defeat attacks and deal with their aftermath apply for operating reactors regardless of whether their licenses have been renewed or not."

Nuclear critics are not assuaged by the NRC's conclusion in 2001 that the likelihood of a nuclear fuel catastrophe at Shearon Harris is once every 5 million years.

Waste decays slowly

Nuclear waste remains radioactive for hundreds of thousand of years, but it is especially potent in the first century after the spent fuel is removed from the nuclear reactor. The uranium pellets are arranged in rods and bundled in assemblies and have to be cooled in pools for at least five years before they can be stored outdoors and kept safely apart in hardened casks. One year after being taken out of the reactor core, the radiation emitted from a single spent fuel assembly produces a lethal dose in 6 to 9 seconds. After 50 years, a spent fuel assembly emits a lethal dose in about 3 to 4 minutes.

Neither NC WARN nor the Nuclear Information & Resource Service in Maryland, an anti-nuclear group that also opposes the Shearon Harris relicensing, expects its security arguments to prevail with the NRC initially. Opponents in the Triangle, like the attorneys general in other states that have appealed NRC rulings and await court decisions, expect to appeal to federal court. Opponents have been encouraged by a favorable federal court ruling last June involving waste storage at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the California utility's appeal, forcing the NRC to study the environmental consequences of a terrorist attack on the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility. Although the NRC is not required to conduct such a review for Shearon Harris or other nuclear plants, opponents say the review in California could expose the risks of nuclear waste storage, forcing changes at all nuclear plants.

It could cost $7 billion dollars to move older waste from the nation's 65 operating nuclear sites into dry storage, which has been done in Germany and Switzerland, according to a 2003 study co-authored by Alvarez of the Institute for Policy Studies.

The nation's electric utilities built nuclear plants on the assumption that the federal government would open a permanent geologic depository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. That project has been stalled by controversy and may never accept nuclear waste. Although the nuclear industry did not plan on long-term storage of radioactive material, it has been forced to defend the safety of the practice.

"There's always individuals who say, 'You can do more, you can analyze more,' " said Timothy Cleary, Progress Energy's general manager of nuclear plant development. "The NRC has already ruled the cooling capabilities at the pools at Shearon Harris are fully capable of keeping the fuel safe for the public."

Staff writer John Murawski can be reached at (919) 829-8932 or john.murawski@newsobserver.com.

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Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.