FirstEnergy Prepares for Dry Cask Storage at Nuclear Plants

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Research by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--FirstEnergy Corporation's (NYSE:FE) (Akron, Ohio) Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Station (Shippingport, Pennsylvania) is performing site preparation for independent spent fuel storage installation for dry cask storages. Construction will begin in the spring of 2013, with project completion by the end of 2014. Transnuclear (Columbia, Maryland) will be installing six stainless steel canisters to store spent nuclear fuel rods from two Westinghouse pressurized water reactors. Beaver Valley is using the spent fuel pools already located near the site, but they are supposed to reach their full capacity by 2015.

Finding a safe place to store spent fuel from 100-plus reactors around the country is still the biggest obstacle facing the nuclear industry. Where can we actually store tons of radioactive nuclear waste for years to come and actually be safe? Yucca Mountain (Las Vegas, Nevada), which was supposed to be the nation's first underground storage facility for all the spent fuel from all nuclear plants, is still being debated after all these years. It was blocked by the Obama administration last year and is awaiting a hearing from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Until that issue is settled, and the repository is built, spent fuel from nuclear plants is being stored in cooling ponds or expensive dry cask storage facilities on sites.

Fuel that has been stored in cooling water for at least five years and has radioactivity that has decreased enough can be stored in dry casks and left on site. This frees up space in the water pool for storing new fuel. The dry casks are typically in sealed metal cylinders, with concrete or metal shells set on a concrete pad.

FirstEnergy had dry cask storages at its Perry Nuclear Plant (Perry, Ohio) built this year, using Holtec's (Jupiter, Florida) HI-STORM cask system. The Perry plant is licensed to operate until 2026. Another dry cask project is being planned at its Davis-Besse site in Oak Harbor, Ohio.

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