Part One of Two Parts
As I have mentioned before in previous blog posts, I am very concerned about the decommissioning of closed nuclear reactors. Decommissioning is a complex and expensive process. The reactor has to be disassembled and the pieces properly disposed of. The U.S. has about a hundred operating nuclear power reactors. All of them will reach the end of their licensed life-spans within the next few decades. A few have already been shut down because they were getting too expensive to repair and maintain or because they could not compete in the energy market.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires the owners of all nuclear power plants to have sufficient funds set aside for decommissioning. Owners of about twenty percent of the operating nuclear power reactors in the U.S. do not have sufficient funds set aside and are being pressured by the NRC. Some of the set aside funds are invested in stocks. If the stock market crashes again, those funds could be wiped out. If a company that owns and operates nuclear power reactors goes bankrupt, presumably it would be up to the tax payers to come up with sufficient funds to decommission closed reactors.
If time comes to decommission a nuclear power reactor and the funds are not available, then it might just be boarded up and fenced off until money does become available. Given the desperate financial situation of the state and federal governments these days and the dire predictions of coming crises, such mothballed plants could sit there for decades without being decommissioned. Radioactive materials could leak out over time, severe weather could breach the containment or terrorists could deliberately loot or destroy the boarded up plants.
The U.S. government has been making nuclear power plant operators pay into a fund intended to support the construction and operation of a permanent geological repository for spent nuclear fuel. The repository was promised by 1999 but after decades of work, the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository project was cancelled in 2009. It is now estimated that there will be no such repository before 2050. At its peak, the fund had around thirty billion dollars. Some of the nuclear power reactors owners have begun to use lawsuits to claw back some of the funds donated.
The law supporting the waste disposal fund was written specifically to exclude the use of such funds for temporary spent nuclear fuel. There has been pressure to change those rules to allow some of the waste fund to be used for that purpose. Recently, some owners have been using some of the money set aside for decommissioning to create dry casks storage for their spent nuclear fuel at the reactors sites. Although this does violate NRC regulations, the NRC has granted exemptions to every owner that has requested permission. An NRC spokesperson said, "All of the plants that have permanently shut down in recent years have sought, and been approved for, the use of decommissioning funds for spent fuel storage costs."
Please read Part Two
