Monday, August 31, 2009

Someday, this could all be ours...

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
After decades of national debate over what to do with spent nuclear fuel, and with no resolution in sight, the Kewaunee nuclear power plant in northeastern Wisconsin finally ran out of storage space inside the plant.

So over the past week, Kewaunee workers have begun storing radioactive waste in casks on the grounds of the reactor, a short distance from the shores of Lake Michigan.

After a practice run a few weeks ago, workers moved spent fuel into the first of the 25-ton, 16-foot-long casks and then transferred the cask into a concrete vault outside the building Aug. 22, said Mark Kanz, spokesman for the Kewaunee Power Station. A second cask was transferred Thursday.
...
The dwindling storage space in the spent-fuel pool inside the Kewaunee plant was among the factors that led Wisconsin utilities to sell the reactor to Dominion several years ago. Dominion then proceeded with plans to build the dry-cask storage system and applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to keep the plant running until 2033.

Point Beach experienced a brief fire during a spent-fuel transfer attempt in 1996. The hydrogen fire inside one of the casks produced enough force to blow a 3-ton lid 3 inches into the air. That incident resulted in an investigation and a $325,000 fine against Wisconsin Electric, which owned the plant at the time.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission later required Wisconsin Electric, which now operates under the trade name We Energies, to use a different kind of storage container for the used but still radioactive nuclear fuel.

Some Wisconsin environmental groups have been critical of nuclear power in part because of the onsite storage of radioactive waste on the grounds of the two plants.

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