One of the biggest problems with nuclear power is how to dispose of the spent nuclear fuel produced by nuclear power reactors. One solution is to reprocess the fuel to recover uranium and plutonium which can be used to make more nuclear fuel but can also be used to make nuclear weapons. Nuclear fuel reprocessing is complex and dangerous. Another solution is to store it in a deep geological repository which is a good solution except that there are only a few national repositories and this solution is not available for most of spent nuclear fuel.
A temporary solution is to store the spent nuclear fuel in dry cask currently made of steel and concrete. This is a solution that has been adopted by some nuclear plant operators. The canisters can either be stored on the same site as the reactors or they can be transported to an interim storage facility. It is hoped that such canisters can last at least a hundred years by which time it is hoped that a better alternative for disposal will have been found and implemented.
Holtec International is an equipment supplier for the nuclear power industry. They manufacture dry casks. They have plants in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Orrville, Ohio and Camden New Jersey. In January of this year, Holtec announced a new fuel basket for fast track decommissioning. Fuel baskets hold the spent fuel assemblies in the dry casks.
The new baskets are made of Metamic HT which is an aluminium boron carbide metal matrix composite. The baskets are welded with a technique called friction-stir welding. This type of welding is superior to conventional welding and does not have the distortion typical of a regular weld. The new baskets have over ten times the thermal conductivity of conventional stainless steel fuel baskets. This means that instead of waiting seven years for spent fuel to cool enough to be transported, the fuel will typically be cool enough in two and one half years. Holtec estimates that a closed nuclear power plant site could be restored to its original condition in about five and a half years.
Ukraine currently has fifteen nuclear power reactors which provide about half of its electricity. They pay Russia about two hundred million dollars a year to remove, transport and reprocess their spent nuclear fuel.
In 2004, Energoatom, the Ukrainian nuclear power agency, contracted with Holtec to build a Central Spent Fuel Storage Facility (CSFSF). The project was repeatedly stalled due to the political instability in Ukraine but work resumed in 2014 after things calmed down. In 2015, it was announced that the technology necessary to construct the dry casks would eventually be transferred to Ukraine’s Turboatom under a memorandum of understanding between the two companies and Energoatom. The contract was amended in 2016 to have the CSFSF built at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Initial plans call for the CSFSF to store spent nuclear fuel from three Ukrainian nuclear power plants: Khmelnitsky, Rovno and South Ukraine. Ultimately, Holtec will deliver ninety four dry cask storage systems to Ukraine by 2020.
In early May of this year, Energoatom officials took a tour of Holtec’s Orrville plant. The President of Energoatom said “We're very pleased with what we saw. The quality of the individual items of equipment that have already been manufactured by the American specialists for our order convincingly demonstrates that Ukraine will receive one of the most modern and safest storage facilities for used nuclear fuel in the world.”
