A Case of Hurry Up and Take Your Time: Indian Point Forges Ahead With New Casks
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
August 30, 2003

BUCHANAN, N.Y. — When Consolidated Edison first talked about taking highly radioactive spent fuel out of the storage pool at the Indian Point 2 nuclear power plant and putting it in concrete-and-steel casks behind the reactor building, opponents denounced the project as a ploy to keep the reactor running and producing even more waste even though there was no permanent disposal site.

But that was before Sept. 11, 2001, and now positions have changed: the opponents are suddenly eager for the casks, and the reactor operator wants to proceed slowly.

The current operator, Entergy Nuclear, is still moving ahead with the plan. It has ordered the casks and is surveying the land around the reactor to decide where to put them. But because the casks cost about $700,000 each and the company is reluctant to pay for them sooner than they are needed, Entergy wants to set them up at a more deliberate pace, about three a year.

That is not fast enough, say the people who are anxious about the reactor's continued operation. They say the pools of radioactive waste at Indian Point 2 and its sister plant, Indian Point 3, are far more vulnerable to a terrorist attack than the casks.

"How fast can you accelerate the program?" asked Susan Tolchin, a spokeswoman for Andrew Spano, the county executive of Westchester, where Indian Point is located.

Mr. Spano, who has requested that the casks be installed and filled as fast as possible, and others say the pools of spent fuel, designed to withstand earthquakes and tornadoes but not terrorism, might not survive the impact of a hijacked jetliner that crashed into the plant. And since the pools hold far more radioactivity than the reactors themselves, some fear an apocalypse.

Entergy says it is considering the county executive's request. Unlike in the pool, fuel in the casks, known as dry casks, requires no active cooling system, and there is no water to leak away or cause corrosion, or carry away leaking bits of fuel.

But the safety benefits come with a political complication. Neither Entergy nor the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has approved such casks at more than a dozen other reactor sites, wants to take any step that would suggest that there is anything wrong with the pools. And so a curious political dance is emerging.

Roy P. Zimmerman, the director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's office of nuclear security and incident response, said in a telephone interview this month that moving fuel to dry casks was "a good initiative." But he added: "We have found that security controls are sufficient for spent fuel pools. We find that to be acceptable as well" as storing fuel in casks.

If Entergy moved the fuel to dry casks faster than it needed, the action would set a precedent: it would be the first time that any of the 103 civilian power reactors in the United States had made physical changes in its operations to reduce its vulnerability to terrorism, according to experts at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and elsewhere.

Reactor owners have added security improvements like vehicle barriers, razor wire, guard posts and intruder sensing systems, Indian Point more than most, but they have not changed the way they operate the plants themselves.

As far as the validity of the threat to radioactive pools, opinions are mixed. A study published in a Princeton University scientific journal this spring said a successful terrorist attack on a pool could have consequences "significantly worse than Chernobyl." But earlier this month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the study was wrong and the pools were not vulnerable.

Mr. Zimmerman and Entergy assert that a fuel pool, which must be continuously cooled, filtered and chemically monitored, is no more vulnerable to attack than the cask system, with no moving parts, no threat of corrosion and no water to drain out.

On the other side of the debate is Riverkeeper, a nonprofit advocacy organization that is leading the drive against Indian Point. Alex Matthiessen, its executive director, said that if Entergy were serious about minimizing risk, it should move as much fuel as possible into dry casks.

The pools, he said, are too densely packed, and would heat up quickly and perhaps catch fire in a successful attack.

And then he made precisely the argument that Entergy is determined not to endorse. If the company agreed to move fuel into casks faster, he said, it would be "an acknowledgment of that danger."

A nuclear critic with extensive technical expertise, David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said moving fuel into casks could increase or lessen risk, depending on how it was done. The primary risk of using casks, he said, is that an accident could occur while they are being filled.

Each cask has an inner sleeve that is lowered into the spent fuel pool, loaded with 32 of the assemblies, hauled out again, drained, dried, filled with inert gas and sealed. Each assembly weighs about 1,500 pounds, and when pulled out of the water, the cask weighs about 105 tons.

"If you were to drop the thing, it could do a lot of damage until it comes to rest," said Mr. Lochbaum. In the worst case, he said, it would strike the wall of the pool.

In fact, Indian Point will need a new crane and some structural improvements for the job, Entergy engineers say.

Mr. Lochbaum said that if the dry cask system were used to maintain equilibrium in the pool but the pool were kept full, the total risk would rise. If it were used to lower the inventory in the pool, the risk would fall, he said.

The assemblies are so radioactive that without the shielding of the water, or the steel and concrete of the casks, they would deliver a lethal dose in seconds. In plants around the country, though, cask storage is now routine. The casks sit on slabs of reinforced concrete, surrounded by razor wire and closed-circuit cameras, looking like basketball courts at a high-security prison. When first filled, each gives off about 20 kilowatts of heat, about the same as 15 electric space heaters running full blast.

Depending on the weather on any given day, the surface temperature of the cask is 80 to 90 degrees.
Radiation levels at the surface are about one millirem per hour, which is about the dose a person gets in one day; at the fence, the dose is too small to be measurable, according to Geoff Schwartz, the manager of Entergy's cask project. He said the casks would last for many decades and are "beautifully simple."

Entergy also owns Indian Point 3, a newer plant with a smaller inventory of spent fuel, and will eventually move some of its fuel to dry casks as well until the federal government, already five years behind schedule, begins hauling the waste away.

At each reactor, 193 assemblies make up the core. Over the years, the plants have switched to assemblies with more usable uranium in them, so each assembly is in the core for up to 24 months, compared with less than a year when the plants were new. The older plant, Unit 2, now has nearly 1,100 assemblies in the pool, which can hold 1,374, but Entergy wants to maintain enough space to remove all assemblies if necessary. Unit 3's total is approaching 900.

Entergy's plan is to build a concrete pad that can hold more than 50 casks, which would give it enough capacity to operate until the reactors' current licenses expire, in 2013 and 2015. The company is expected to apply for an extension to those licenses, which means the cask total could rise higher.

The Energy Department signed contracts in the 1980's that obligated it to begin accepting spent fuel for deep geologic burial in 1998. It has settled on Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, as a burial site, but faces enormous technical and legal challenges in opening a repository there. Con Edison, skeptical about the government's ability to fulfill the contracts, joined a group of utilities seeking to build dry casks on an Indian reservation near Salt Lake City, and Entergy acquired a share of that partnership when it bought Unit 2, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not approved the plan.

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