Abstract
We're standing in a cold, quiet chamber in the emptying interior of the Maine Yankee Atomic Power Station. An armed guard is frisking Bill Oddell, plant operations director, in the next room. I'm waiting next to a piece of old machinery with bright yellow signs posted on it that read “Contaminated Area.” Every so often I find myself glancing down at the radiation counter I'm wearing around my neck. When it's my turn to be frisked for weapons, the counter still reads 0.0 millirems, which is fine by me.
The guard is satisfied that we're clean. We proceed through a security door and into another industrial-scale chamber which, unlike its neighbors, is warm, noisy, and well lit. We climb some metal stairs onto a platform where we're greeted by another armed guard. He makes sure we leave our bags, hard hats, security glasses, id cards, pens, and other easily dropped objects on a bench before waving us over to the spent fuel pool.
“Be careful not to drop anything,” Oddell reminds me as we walk to a railing at the other side of the platform. I press the radiation meter against my chest and peek over the railing. Here it is, the source of all the controversy: 1,434 spent nuclear fuel rods standing at the bottom of an enormous pool of crystal clear water.
The stockpile is evenly spaced in a grid of metal dividers and represents Maine Yankee's total output from when it went online in 1972 until it closed in 1997. Pumped, demineral-ized water keeps the rods cool and absorbs radiation so effectively that Oddell and I can have a short look at them in our street clothes. When we leave the pool my meter reads 0.1 millirems: an insignificantly small dose, but a reminder that all of this–the 40×40×40-foot pool, the pumps, the humming ventilators, the armed guards–really is necessary.
Maine Yankee has a problem. Like nuclear power plants across the country, this 800-megawatt station has been storing all of its spent fuel on site pending the completion of a federal high-level nuclear waste disposal site. But Maine Yankee is one of a growing number of nuclear plants that have been permanently closed and are in the process of being dismantled. In a few years the plant and its workers will be gone. The plant's gorgeous waterfront site on the coast of Maine will be ready for redevelopment and the company that now owns it can cease to exist.
Discarded turbine housing at the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant in Wiscasset, Maine.
Only there's still nowhere to dispose of all that spent fuel. So even as Maine Yankee dismantles its nuclear plant, workers are busy building a brand new $60 million home for the fuel rods, reactor vessel, and other high-level nuclear waste. Over the next two years spent fuel will be taken from the storage pool, placed in 64 transportable casks, and interred in the new dry storage facility where it will be attended to at a cost of $4 million a year.
And there the casks will sit until the federal government gets around to creating a nuclear waste repository. What worries people in Maine is that it may be a very, very long wait.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. Back in 1974 the federal government promised that it would eventually take possession of spent fuel from all of the country's commercial nuclear plants. As the spent fuel began piling up on plant sites in the early 1980s, the nuclear industry started pressuring the government to take steps toward honoring that commitment. Ultimately, Congress passed a law obliging the Energy Department to remove the fuel by no later than January 31, 1998.
At Maine Yankee (left), bundled titanium alloy tubes await shipment (above).
But Congress also passed laws ordering Energy to study one, and only one, potential disposal site–Yucca Mountain, a remote, barren volcanic ridge on the nuclear testing range in southeastern Nevada. “They haven't really looked at any other site other than Yucca Mountain because all other areas of the country have been politically excluded by more powerful states,” says Robert Loux, head of the Agency for Nuclear Projects at the Governor of Nevada's office in Carson City. “The country ought to find a good repository site and this is not one.”
Yucca Mountain appears far from perfect. The site lies between two seismic faults and is only 12 miles from the epicenter of a 1992 earthquake that measured 5.6 on the Richter scale. Some scientists believe the mountain flooded from below in the distant past, raising the possibility it might happen again during the 10,000-year lifetime of the project. A complex computer model developed at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory suggests that mineral-laden water will be driven from surrounding rocks by the heat from the nuclear wastes and will drip down or condense on the storage casks, causing them to corrode. Project engineers say the storage canisters will be effective for 270,000 years, but Loux says his contractors believe scientists who say the casks could fail in 300 to 400 years.
“Congress acted on political, not scientific, criteria in choosing this site,” Loux says.
The Energy Department, which has spent $3.5 billion studying Yucca Mountain, is expected to recommend going forward next year. If the president agrees with the recommendation, a proposal will be submitted to Congress. If Congress votes to support the project–and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issues a license–then 70,000 metric tons of spent fuel will start making its way to Yucca Mountain in 2010.
But further delays can be expected. The state of Nevada–whose legislature passed a law in 1989 prohibiting the storage of high-level waste in the state–will mount every legal challenge it can to block the facility. And then there's the matter of Congress budgeting another $20 billion to drill 100 miles of tunnels under the mountain and fill them with secure containers.
“We can only meet that 2010 schedule if we have the budget to fulfill it,” says Allen Benson, Energy's Las Vegas-based spokesman for the project. “If Congress doesn't approve the project, then we restore the site, pack things up, and report to Congress for new instructions.”
Even if it's on schedule, Maine Yankee's waste will have to wait its turn. Yucca Mountain will accept spent fuel rods in strict chronological order, starting with the oldest spent fuel in the country and working its way to more recent fuel. Decommissioned plants have no special priority, so Maine Yankee's fuel rods are expected to remain on the Wiscasset coast for at least two decades and probably much longer.
“We're back over in the “cold,” non-nuclear side of Maine Yankee, and it really is cold because the heating systems have been dismantled and carted away for disposal. So has a lot of the heavy machinery, and our footsteps echo in the empty chambers. The turbine room, once bright and screamingly loud, is dimly lit and chilly. To ensure worker safety, plant officials cut off all power, heat, and plumbing in most of the plant, and a contractor jury-rigged a completely separate power supply for decommissioning work. Oddell tells me that in the winter it gets so cold ice forms in ground floor corridors.
In the now-irrelevant control room sits a heap of discarded cables and circa-1972 electronic equipment. Banks of analog gauges rest at zero. Here and there an old instrument has been pulled out and sent off to some other nuclear plant of the same vintage in need of spare parts.
Outside in the yard are stacks of five-foot-thick, reinforced concrete slabs cut from the bottom of the containment dome. Plywood covers a new opening in the wall, which is large enough for trucks and heavy machinery to pass through. There's obviously no going back.
Maine Yankee has joined with two other decommissioned plants, Yankee Rowe in Massachusetts and Connecticut Yankee, to sue the Energy Department for $300 million in damages–the cost, they say, of having to store their spent fuel between now and 2010. Northern States Power has a separate $1 billion suit. All the operators are angry that they (and therefore their ratepayers) have already paid hundreds of millions of dollars into a federal waste disposal fund and yet must lay out tens of millions more to safely store their wastes now that the plants that produced them are closed.
“We really want the Energy Department to perform under the contract and come in here and remove the fuel right away,” Maine Yankee President Michael E. Thomas says. “They may very well have the capabilities to store this fuel immediately–they've demonstrated their ability to take spent fuel from foreign reactors. This is a political, not a technical, problem.”
“There's no reason for spent fuel to stay at a shut-down site,” says Maine Nuclear Safety Adviser Paula Craig-head. “A coastal village in a touristed area with a wet and cold marine climate that no longer has any [nuclear] knowledge base is clearly not the best site to store spent fuel.” She believes Energy has plenty of contaminated nuclear sites that would be appropriate for interim storage. If Energy won't take the waste, she says, Maine could explore overseas solutions.
But for the foreseeable future Wis-casset's spent fuel will stay where it was produced. And that worries local activist Ray Shadis, who spearheaded the movement to shut down Maine Yankee and now works with company officials on an advisory panel. “Waste has a way of attracting more waste,” he says, particularly if it sits at a site with easy barge, rail, and highway access just up the coast from other nuclear plants and the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard's nuclear submarine facility. “It would be just too convenient to bring it here,” he says. “And the Devil never sleeps.”