By Gregg Hoffmann
La CROSSE — About 40 tons of spent fuel from the Dairyland Power Cooperative nuclear reactor in Genoa could end up in Utah.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s voted last Friday to approve a private company’s plan to build a nuclear waste storage site on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation in Utah.
Private Fuel Storage, a group of utilities that includes La Crosse-based Dairyland, wants to store about 40,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel at the site 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. That includes about 40 tons of spent fuel from Genoa.
Dairyland recently announced plans to tear down its nuclear reactor in Genoa and ship it to South Carolina by 2007, but some concerns about the spent fuel rods remain.
The reactor will be filled with concrete this year. Removal of the reactor vessel is scheduled for 2006. The vessel will be shipped to a low-level nuclear storage facility in South Carolina in 2007.
The process clears the way to remove high-level radioactive spent fuel rods, plant manager Roger Christians said at a public information meeting in August at De Soto High School. Christians said the rods might remain on site in dry storage casks for several years until the federal government can open its own storage facility.
Of biggest concern has been the spent fuel. Until the spent fuel is removed, Dairyland cannot fully decommission the Genoa facility, which it shut down in 1987.
Dairyland officials say maintaining the closed facility until the spent fuel can be moved costs the coop more than $5.5 million annually.
The earliest the Utah facility is expected to be operational is 2008, said John Parkyn, chairman and CEO of Private Fuel Storage as well as Dairyland’s manager of nuclear and special projects. It’s too soon to predict whether Dairyland’s spent nuclear fuel will be shipped there in 2008, he said.
Opposition to the Utah facility is strong. Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman vowed last week to challenge the NRC decision in the courts. Other Utah officials promised to fight the facility using all possible options. The state contends the project would be too dangerous.
Utah officials had argued the facility would be too close to a major population center and that the risk of a jet fighter from Hill Air Force Base crashing into the storage casks was too great.
Private Fuel Storage’s facility would be a temporary dump pending the opening of a national nuclear waste repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the senate minority leader, has proposed storing nuclear waste at the facilities where it is produced — an alternative to both the Private Fuel Storage site and Yucca Mountain.
An impoverished tribe, the Goshutes had been looking for ways to make money and eventually teamed with Private Fuel Storage to propose the station.
Under their plan, the waste would be kept above ground in 4,000 steel casks, which can hold up to 10 tons of spent fuel each. The casks would be shielded in an overpack of two steel shells encasing a wall of concrete more than 2 feet thick.
The federal government built Dairyland’s nuclear plant, known as the La Crosse Boiling Water Reactor, in 1967. Dairyland shut down the reactor in 1987, and has been working to decommission it.
Christians said Dairyland has hired Duratek Inc. to help remove the 200-ton reactor pressure vessel, which will be encased in concrete and steel and shipped by train to South Carolina. The entire shipment will weigh 400 tons, and require a special 20-axle rail car.
The train will go south from Genoa to the Quad Cities and then to Barnwell, S.C., officials said. Removing the low-level waste to South Carolina will cost Dairyland an estimated $18.5 million.
Dairyland officials also announced they will spend $50 million over the next two years on new pollution control equipment at the adjacent coal-fired electric plant.
