News Archive 2005

Indian Point Readies Plans For Spent Fuel
Kirk Semple and Matthew L. Wald
The New York Times
February 13, 2005

BUCHANAN -- THE man who is in charge of the biggest project in years at the Indian Point nuclear power plant is wiry and serious and a self-described exercise addict. He works out twice a day, measures his food intake to the calorie and, though 53 years old, says he is careful to maintain his body fat at around 5 percent.

Geoffrey E. Schwartz's personal punctiliousness extends to his work, his colleagues say, and that's a good thing. ''You know nothing's going to go wrong with a guy who knows his body fat,'' said Jim Steets, the spokesman for Entergy Nuclear Northeast, which operates Indian Point's two functioning reactors.

Mr. Schwartz, a nuclear engineer, is coordinating the preparation of a new storage system for the plant's spent fuel rods of used uranium, which, after six years in the reactor, must be removed. The plant now deposits spent fuel in 35-foot-deep storage pools that block radiation. But the pools are close to full.

For years, like many other nuclear plants around the country, Indian Point planned to move used fuel to an underground federal storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The government was supposed to begin accepting the waste in January 1998, but the project was delayed. The federal Energy Department is promising to begin accepting waste in 2010, but on Jan. 14, Spencer Abraham, the outgoing secretary of energy, acknowledged that this date was unlikely.

In the face of prolonged doubts about the future of Yucca Mountain, Indian Point has resorted to a system called dry cask storage, in use at numerous nuclear plants across the country, to warehouse the fuel rods. They remain dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years.

At Indian Point, the dry cask storage will involve locking the spent fuel rods in 19-foot-high concrete and steel silos. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Entergy say pool storage and dry casks are equally safe methods, but some critics of nuclear plants regard dry casks as the safer option because casks have no mechanical systems that could go awry and no cooling water that could leak out and contaminate the ecosystem.

Entergy had hoped to begin the transfer of spent fuel rods in late spring or early summer. But the company has had to delay the transfer until at least late fall, in part because of unforeseen difficulties in excavating particularly hard bedrock to build a new floor for the loading bay inside the Indian Point 2 fuel storage building to support equipment used in the process.

The company is planning to begin the pool-to-cask transfer at the still-active Indian Point 2 in late fall or early winter, officials said in mid-January. Fuel transfer from Indian Point 1, which is now defunct, is scheduled for 2007 and from the active Indian Point 3 in the fall of 2008.

The plant has until 2010 -- a very comfortable cushion -- before the storage pools fill completely, but Mr. Schwartz said he expected to have the first six casks packed by the middle of next year.

Entergy declined to say what the project would cost, except that it would be in the tens of millions of dollars and that it would seek to recover some of the costs from the Energy Department.

Entergy and nuclear regulatory officials say the dry storage process is safe and simple and has been used for years around the country. ''It's so well thought out, so methodical, that's it's almost like a nonissue,'' Mr. Steets said. ''It'll be the first time we've done it here, but it'll be just another day.''

Some critics say that Indian Point's new storage plan is not necessarily hazardproof and that the calculations of Mr. Schwartz and others need to be updated.

A lobby led by the Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition, a group of civic organizations that wants to shut down the plant and its two reactors, has faulted Entergy for its choice of dry casks, saying the current model has design faults. But Entergy says the casks comply with federal regulations and are secure enough to prevent radiation leaks and survive terrorist attacks, even the impact of a commercial jet.

Critics also worry that the casks might be vulnerable to earthquakes. Entergy officials note that the concrete storage pad for the casks will sit on top of 12,000 tons of crushed stone that would act as a shock absorber in an earthquake.

But Lynn R. Sykes, a professor of earth and environmental science at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, pointed out that the earthquake standards used to approve the casks were the same ones that applied when the plant was designed, nearly 40 years ago. That standard, he said, is outdated.

One problem, he said, was that scientists in the 1960's based their analysis on earthquakes in the western United States and in Japan, where only low-frequency shaking motions are transmitted long distances. But he said a more recent study had found that the rock in the eastern United States transmits high-frequency energy much better.

''Dry casks, critical piping and spent fuel assemblies are likely to be more sensitive to shaking at higher frequencies at sites east of the Rocky Mountains,'' he said in a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in July.

One way earthquakes damage manufactured structures is that the structures resonate at a frequency similar to the ground shaking, like a soprano shattering a glass by singing at the right pitch.

Dr. Sykes added that earthquakes were possible along two belts in the region. One is the Ramapo Fault zone, which runs from Peapack, N.J., northeast into Rockland County and across the Hudson River into the upper corner of Westchester at Peekskill, just north of Indian Point.

He recommended bolting the casks to the storage pad at Indian Point, as is done at Diablo Canyon, on the California coast. But nuclear regulators and Entergy officials say this is unnecessary.

The regulatory commission's staff, in a recent letter responding to Mr. Sykes's complaints, said that the earthquake standard that should apply is the one used when Indian Point was first licensed. This standard would also be used if Entergy applied to renew the reactors' 40-year operating permits, the staff said.

The Ramapo Fault, the staff said, was ''very unlikely to generate any earthquakes larger than historical earthquakes.'' And plant structures, the letter said, will not resonate at high frequencies.

Mr. Schwartz called each 180-ton cask ''a very, very robust object'' and said that even if one were to tip over -- an act requiring what he called ''an enormous force, a huge force'' -- the cask and the internal fuel assembly would remain intact.

''The beauty of these things rests in their simplicity,'' he said, patting the lid of the scale model cask he uses for demonstrations.

''It's a great big cylinder,'' he added dryly, ''and you put the fuel in it.''

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