Waste Management

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering allowing Entergy to use a portion of the decommissioning trust fund (DTF) for the Arkansas Nuclear One nuclear power plant to dispose of several major radioactive components (MRC) that have been taken out of service at the two-unit pressurized water reactor.

The American Nuclear Society joined seven other organizations to send a letter to Energy Secretary Christopher Wright on July 8, asking to meet with him to discuss “the restoration of a highly functioning program to meet DOE’s legal responsibility to manage and dispose of the nation’s commercial and legacy defense spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW).”

The Department of Energy said it anticipated delivering a research cask of high-burnup spent nuclear fuel from Dominion Energy’s North Anna nuclear power plant in Virginia to Idaho National Laboratory by fall 2027. The planned shipment is part of the High Burnup Dry Storage Research Project being conducted by the DOE with the Electric Power Research Institute.

As preparations continue, the DOE said it is working closely with federal agencies as well as tribal and state governments along potential transportation routes to ensure safety, transparency, and readiness every step of the way.

Watch the DOE’s latest video outlining the project here.

Work crews at Idaho National Laboratory have transferred 40 spent nuclear fuel canisters into long-term storage vaults, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has reported.

The Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory will collaborate with Wisconsin-based fusion technology company Shine to design new chemical processes for separating valuable materials from used nuclear fuel.

The Department of Energy announced that waste from two more tanks at its Savannah River Site has been removed ahead of schedule. The tanks—numbers 11 and 15—are the fourth and fifth waste containers in 12 months to meet the milestone of preliminary cease waste removal (PCWR) regulatory approval, 7 and 19 months ahead of schedule, respectively, according to the DOE.

Nagra, Switzerland’s national cooperative for the disposal of radioactive waste, has published its general license applications for a deep geologic repository and separate spent fuel encapsulation plant, making the documents publicly available on a digital platform.

This spring, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced that it had achieved a major milestone by completing commissioning of the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System (SSCVS) facility—a new, state-of-the-art, large-scale ventilation system at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the DOE’s geologic repository for defense-related transuranic (TRU) waste in New Mexico.

The Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (Svensk Kärnbränslehantering AB, or SKB) has signed a collaboration agreement with the multinational construction company Implenia to build the first underground section of a deep repository for radioactive waste near Sweden’s Forsmark nuclear power plant.

As the global energy landscape shifts toward safer, smaller, and more flexible nuclear power, Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and Generation IV technologies are at the forefront of innovation. These advanced designs pose new challenges in size, efficiency, and operating environment that traditional instrumentation and control solutions aren’t always designed to handle.

Matt Bowen

With a new administration and Congress, it is time once again to ponder what will happen—if anything—on U.S. spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste management policy over the next few years. One element of the forthcoming discussion seems clear: The executive and legislative branches are eager to talk about recycling commercial SNF. Whatever the merits of doing so, it does not obviate the need for one or more facilities for disposal of remaining long-lived radionuclides. For that reason, making progress on U.S. disposal capabilities remains urgent, lest the associated radionuclide inventories simply be left for future generations to deal with.

In March, Rick Perry, who was secretary of energy during President Trump’s first administration, observed that during his tenure at the Department of Energy it became clear to him that any plan to move SNF “required some practical consent of the receiving state and local community.”¹

The Supreme Court voted 6–3 against Texas and a group of landowners today in a case involving the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing of a consolidated interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel, reversing a decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to grant the state and landowners Fasken Land and Minerals (Fasken) standing to challenge the license.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said that crews at its Hanford Site in Washington state are preparing for the site’s first-ever transfer of radioactive waste from one of its large underground tanks, Tank AP-106, to the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP).

Brussels-based construction group Besix announced that is has been chosen by the Belgian agency for radioactive waste management ONDRAF/NIRAS for construction of the country’s surface disposal facility for low- and intermediate-level short-lived nuclear waste in Dessel.

A scientific mission led by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) set sail this past weekend in the Northeast Atlantic to investigate the long-term impacts of radioactive waste dumped at sea between the 1950s and 1990s.

Working with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy has revised its planned approach to remediating contaminated soil underneath the Chemical Materials Engineering Laboratory (commonly known as the 324 Building) at the Hanford Site in Washington state. The soil, which has been designated the 300-296 waste site, became contaminated as the result of a spill of highly radioactive material in the mid-1980s.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

The title for this year’s waste management issue of Nuclear News is, in my opinion, the perfect framing to consider spent fuel and waste management as we know it now and how we imagine it could look in the future. So, let’s break it down.

What really is “today’s challenge”? It’s certainly not safety. Since 1955, we have conducted more than 2,500 cask shipments without a single radiological release or incidence of harm to a member of the public. Despite what antinuclear evangelists (in dwindling numbers) might shriek, the industry’s record of storing and transporting used fuel is unassailable.

The lack of progress on a geologic repository isn’t necessarily a challenge to new nuclear development. We already have systems capable of storing used fuel assemblies for more than a century, proven technology with no moving parts.

A new method has received Washington state’s approval for use at the 222-S Laboratory at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site, improving how experts analyze tank waste and providing more precise data to support safe and efficient cleanup.

Studsvik AB has completed construction of the new inDRUM Demonstration Facility outside of Nykoping, Sweden. We can now demonstrate how the inDRUM technology will process a wide range of problematic and legacy wastes through the removal of all liquids, organics and other materials, resulting in a stable and reduced volume product that can be disposed of in a suitable repository.

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization, which is mandated by law to develop an approach for the long-term care of Canada’s spent nuclear fuel, has begun collecting feedback from Canadians and Indigenous people to help refine its process for selecting a second deep geologic repository site.