As if putting away an old car for winter, workers inside the Zion Nuclear Power Station have been draining fluids and capping off lines, getting the machinery ready to sit for a good long time.
The enriched uranium has been lifted from the cold reactors and lowered into a pool with all the other nuclear fuel ever consumed at Zion. The pool will soon officially become the Zion Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Island, a temporary holding site that likely will still be in business three decades from now.
The Zion staff has been reduced from about 800 to 430 and will drop by another 250 by year’s end. In 2000, just 50 people will work there.
When Zion was licensed in 1973, it was the largest nuclear plant in the United States. In January, when Commonwealth Edison announced it was closing the beleaguered and unprofitable plant, it became the largest of the 20 plants that have begun decommissioning. A recent tour of the plant shows it is already an entirely different place, the result of mothballing a product that will remain lethal for millennia.
The containment buildings that hold the reactors are now as still as a church, their domed roofs rising like a cathedral’s. Inside, where the roar of nuclear-heated steam once would have been deafening, the sounds are now as soothing as a waterfall as fluids hiss through vestigial cooling systems that have yet to be turned off.
On Monday night, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission held the first public meeting on how Zion will be decommissioned and decontaminated. Safety and economic concerns were raised during the two-hour meeting, attended by almost 100 people at Zion-Benton High School in Zion.
But anyone hoping to hear that the plant would be gone soon was sorely disappointed.
ComEd has no definitive plans to tear down the lakeside structures after they are decontaminated by 2017. While company officials had earlier indicated that the reactor buildings could be torn down by 2021, they now say that the plant might never be demolished.
“Like any other building, you don’t tear it down once you are done with it, you tear it down because of how that will impact how the property will be used,” said Mike Wallace, a senior vice president with the utility.
The decision about whether to proceed with the demolition–which will cost ComEd some $80 million beyond the costs of decommissioning–will be made sometime in the future, Wallace said.
No matter what decision is made about the reactor buildings, part of the Zion plant is sure to remain for decades. ComEd’s best guess is that the spent fuel, the most lethal and long-lived waste, will not be completely removed from the site before 2031.
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ComEd officials say the site could be cleaned up much sooner, but that they have no place to send the 1,022 metric tons of highly radioactive spent fuel. Almost four decades into the civilian nuclear program, the federal government has not selected a site for the permanent burial ground for waste, which will remain lethal for thousands of years..
“ComEd wants to move faster, but it is beyond our control,” Wallace said. “The pace of this thing is being set by the Department of Energy.”
The control room, where federal regulators long found abysmal performance, is no longer the helm for running a plant, but has become a communications center to oversee its closing.
The parking lot is half empty, and Shiloh Road, which leads toward the plant on a Lake Michigan beach, is littered with dozens of shoes scattered there as part of a strange tradition.
On their final days of employment, employees have long cast a pair of shoes out their car windows as they left the plant. When the layoffs came this spring, the road was full of shoes, and still is.
Inside the plant, one of the two massive generators began spinning again last week, though not to produce power. Both generators are being converted into the world’s largest “synchronous condensers”– devices that draw electrical power off the grid and convert it into electrical pressure.
The device is designed to prevent brownouts in periods of high demand, when tens of thousands of air conditioners can draw power from the grid, reducing pressure just as so many open fire hydrants would to a city’s water system.
The rest of the plant is being readied to go into “SAFSTOR”–a shut-down condition that allows the radiation inside to decay as the plant sits idle for as long as six decades.
The biggest enemy of the plant, as if it were an old barn, now becomes the humidity of summer and the cold of winter.
Although ComEd can button up the reactor buildings, where electricity has not been produced since February 1997, it has to pay much more attention to the facilities that will store the spent fuel.
In the next 1 1/2 years, workers will disconnect the spent fuel pool from the plant’s cooling systems and make it into an autonomous storage site.
On Monday night, Kenosha resident Edwin Andersen raised a safety concern.
“Considering today’s world and all the terrorists, what would happen if a van loaded with explosives got close to the cooling ponds and the fuel rods were dumped in Lake Michigan?” Andersen asked. ComEd officials said that was very unlikely.
Radiological decay already is making the fuel cooler and therefore safer.
When it first emerged from the reactor, the spent fuel was hot enough to potentially start a fire–and a nuclear accident–if it weren’t cooled by water. By the end of this year, the radioactivity in the spent fuel will have decayed enough so that even if it had no water around it, it could no longer melt its metal casings and burn.
ComEd would rather not have the fuel on site. Decommissioning costs for Zion are now estimated at about $800 million, all money that has been collected month by month, in spare-change-sized charges tacked onto electric bills–about 75 cents a month for an average homeowner.
If the federal government had taken the fuel on schedule, the costs would have dropped by $200 million, utility officials say.
In the 1980s, the federal government agreed to begin taking spent nuclear fuel in January of this year. That date has come and gone, and scientists and politicians have yet to agree on where the waste ultimately should go.
A report is due this fall on the feasibility of using Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as a permanent burial ground. Even if it is approved, construction of the repository would reach well into the next century.
To develop its current timetable for decommissioning Zion, ComEd has assumed the government will begin taking spent fuel in 2010. But that doesn’t mean the fuel will leave Zion then.
The order in which the fuel will be taken from more than 100 nuclear plants already has been established, with the oldest waste being taken first.
ComEd estimates that because of Zion’s place in line, the fuel will not begin leaving the Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Island until 2015, and the last shipment will move out in 2031.
In the meantime, the plant is likely to remain a white elephant, a sprawling complex of buildings that is more expensive to demolish than to leave standing.
While ComEd is entertaining any suggestions for new uses for the site, none seem promising.
Amoco Power Resources Corp., based in Houston, has begun studying converting the plant into a generating station that burns natural gas. But many see that plan as unfeasible.
Anthony Markley, a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission project manager, said the agency would have to take a hard look at the wisdom of running a huge gas pipeline so close to a temporary storage site for spent nuclear fuel.
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“An explosion of pipelines or storage tanks could result in the release of radioactive material from the site,” Markley said at an NRC briefing last week.
Also, the plant doesn’t have enough land around it to hold the reserves needed to burn coal.
In any case, the decision on what to do with the ground is unlikely to belong to the public. Said Markley, “All the chips are in Commonwealth Edison’s hands.”