Utah company to remove nuclear fuel from decommissioned power plant

Dec 16 - Chicago Tribune (IL)

In January, a Utah company will begin the most crucial part of its 10-year dismantling of the closed Zion nuclear power plant: Safely removing its radioactive fuel rods.

The project on Chicago's suburban North Shore is the largest in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry and the first in which a plant's owner has turned over its license to a third party for the purpose of dismantling it.

The company, EnergySolutions, is staking its future on the project. How it handles the most expensive and risky phase of the project will be crucial to it winning other such work.

The Zion plant, owned by Chicago-based Exelon Corp., the parent of Commonwealth Edison, generated electricity on the shores of Lake Michigan for close to a quarter of a century. By the time the project is complete, it will have taken nearly as long to destroy it.

Four 10-man teams will work around the clock for a year to remove 1,500 tons of nuclear waste from pools of water where some of it has sat for 40 years.

Zion's nuclear waste, which will remain on site indefinitely, will be packed into 61 steel canisters, and then sealed in concrete, garage-size casks. The casks, each weighing 150 tons, will sit atop a concrete pad and are designed to withstand 360-mph winds, missiles, flooding, fire and earthquakes. The plant itself is being scrapped and hauled off in rail cars to Utah for disposal at a low-level radioactive waste facility owned by EnergySolutions.

Zion is the country's first decommissioning project to take place in a deregulated electricity market, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. As a result, Illinois state regulators will not have authority to question how the dismantling is performed or EnergySolutions' spending decisions. The company is using an $800 million fund that Comomnwealth Edison customers paid into for the decommissioning. The NRC oversees safety-related issues but not spending.

By law, any money left over after the northern Lake County plant is taken down must be returned to utility customers.

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A group of local residents has sued over the financial handling of the project, claiming there are no safeguards to ensure that EnergySolutions isn't wasting money. EnergySolutions says it is only using the funds for expenses related to decommissioning. The suit asks that a court-appointed third party manage the trust fund, which Commonwealth Edison customers paid into from 1998 to 2006. A federal judge dismissed that case in July. An appeal is scheduled to be heard next month in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.

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