Virginia produces two types of nuclear waste, low-level and high-level radioactive waste.
Virginia produces two types of nuclear waste, low-level and high-level radioactive waste.
High-level radioactive waste comes from nuclear power plants. Virginia's four civilian reactors "burn" uranium pellets that were placed in fuel rods, and carefully aligned in fuel assemblies, to produce electricity. When a certain percentage of the uranium has decayed, the spent fuel assemblies are treated as high-level radioactive waste.
Low-level radioactive waste includes radioactively contaminated protective clothing, tools, filters, and rags from nuclear power plant maintenance and operations, plus some medical facility wastes and a few other items. Low-level waste is categorized into three classes. Class A wastes have the lowest concentration of radioactive materials, mostly materials with half-lives of less than five years. Class B wastes have longer half-lives than Class A materials, while Class C wastes have longer half-lives than Class B materials - but still lower than high-level radioactive waste.
If Virginia permits mining of the rich uranium deposit at Coles Hill in Pittsylvania County, the state may start to generate mill tailings, a third form of radioactive waste. A fourth form, transuranic waste, is generated from the reprocessing of nuclear fuel and production of nuclear weapons involving plutonium. Neither of those two activities are based in Virginia, so Virginia should not end up shipping transuranic wastes to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
None of Virginia's low-level or high-level radioactive waste is recycled. All of it is intended to be managed for thousands of years at specialized disposal sites. Where does it go?
Low-Level Radioactive Waste
Congress accepted responsibility to designate locations for high-level nuclear waste disposal, but in the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act of 1980 Congress defined low-level radioactive waste disposal to be a state responsibility and invited the states to establish several regional disposal sites for low-level radioactive waste disposal. Regional partnerships, with the ability to exclude low-level radioactive waste generated outside the boundaries of the partnerships, were documented in interstate compacts ratified by the US Congress starting in 1986.
Virginia joined the Southeast Interstate Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Compact, together with Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina in 1984 (it received Congressional approval in 1986). At the time, Virginia shipped its low-level radioactive waste to Barnwell, South Carolina. It was one of only a handful of facilities nationwide that accepted low-level radioactive waste. Under the terms of the compact, the South Carolina facility was projected to close at the end of 1992.
South Carolina expected one of the other states in the compact to open a replacement facility, so South Carolina would be just the first of the "host" states in its compact and would not get a reputation as a nuclear dumping ground. Each state was required to search for a suitable disposal site for low-level radioactive waste, knowing that few places wanted radioactive waste in their neighborhood and that the political impacts of the decision would be a problem for the second host state.
Virginia's search focused on the Southside region, plus Louisa County.1 Criteria for selecting the site were:2
- amount of potentially suitable area (PSA)
- volume of A waste generated
- volume of B waste generated
- volume of C waste generated
- transportation distances from low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) generators for A waste
- transportation distances from LLRW generators for B waste
- transportation distances from LLRW generators for C waste
- density of transportation systems in potentially suitable areas
- population density of potentially suitable areas
- meteorology of potentially suitable areas
In 1986, the Southeast Interstate Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Compact decided that a new low-level radioactive waste facility should be located in North Carolina in Wake County, near the Chatham County line. North Carolina orginally supported the compact's decision. To sweeten the deal, compact members contributed $80 million for geological and other studies of the site, by imposing fees on generators of nuclear waste who shipped it to Barnwell. North Carolina spent an additional $30 million.3
When North Carolina's project kept missing milestones for obtaining a license and opening a new disposal site, South Carolina agreed to extend the closure date of Barnwell until 1996. In exchange, the state's legislature required that significant revenues be generated for South Carolina. Fees for using Barnwell were jacked up. After South Carolina became fond of the high revenue stream, it requested that the compact allow Barnwell to accept radioactive wastes produced at states outside the compact. The other states blocked that request, and in 1995 South Carolina withdrew from the compact, 4
South Carolina's withdrawal blocked the remaining states from collecting new fees from waste generators, and the compact could no longer subsidize North Carolina's effort to open the site in Wake County. After the remaining states in the Southeast Interstate Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Compact notified North Carolina that it would have to complete the development of the new waste disposal site without additional funding, that project came to a halt. In 1999, the compact "sanctioned" North Carolina, and a lawsuit is expected to be heard by the US Supreme Court in 2010 to force North Carolina to repay $80 million (plus $10 million in legal fees) to the other states.5
Virginia continued to ship its low-level radioactive waste to Barnwell until 2008. A facility on Utah can accept Class A waste from Virginia now, but generators of Class B and Class C waste may have to store it on site until that Utah site (or a new disposal site) has the capability to accept Class B and Class C low-level radioactive wastes.
High-Level Radioactive Waste
High-level radioactive waste is created by four nuclear power reactors at two sites in Virginia (Surry and Lake Anna), plus by various nuclear-powered ships of the Navy traveling in and out of Hampton Roads. Navy waste, produced by nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, is stored at the Savannah River Plant in Aiken, South Carolina, at the Hanford Reservation in Richland, Washington, or at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory in Idaho Falls, Idaho.
In addition, high-level wastes from foreign reactors (originally supplied with nuclear fuel from the United States) have been shipped through Portsmouth, Virginia to Federal storage facilities in South Carolina or Idaho. A Sierra Club lawsuit blocked such shipments through Virginia in 1988, and East Coast shipments were redirected to the military port at Charleston, South Carolina.6
At the moment, all high-level radioactive waste generated in Virginia by civilian nuclear power plants is still stored temporarily in Virginia. Federal efforts have failed to open any waste disposal facilty for permanent high-level radioactive waste storage.
Each of the four civilian power reactors operated by Dominion Resources contains 157 fuel assemblies. Each fuel assembly consists of 204 fuel rods, loaded with 328 ceramic pellets - so over 16 million pellets are used to generate heat to power the reactor. Each pellet has the energy equivalent to 1800 pounds of coal. When the uranium has decayed so much that nuclear fission is no longer creating sufficient heat, the utility company "refuels" the reactor and replaces the fuel assemblies.7
Currently, "spent" fuel assemblies are stored at the Surry and North Anna nuclear power plants. Rods are kept in pools of water to keep the radioactive waste from melting them for 5-10 years, then transferred to "dry casks" for storage outdoors on a concrete pad. Storage at nuclear power plants was expected to be a short-term solution, but a long-term storage facility has not been opened yet. Rather than build new pools to accommodate the waste at North Anna and Surry, Virginia Power obtained the first Federal approval to use dry storage technology and opened the first dry cask storage facility in the nation at Surry, followed by one at North Anna.8
To move the spent fuel assemblies from the wet pool into dry casks, the casks are first placed inside the pool. The fuel rods are loaded into the casks, the lid of the cask is sealed, water is pumped out, and finally helium is pumped into the cask. Storage in the casks requires far less maintenance than storage in the pools, reducing cost of short-term storage while awaiting completion of the permanent repository. (The US Congress directed that Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nevada be excavated and prepared as a national repository for storing all high level waste from commercial reactors by 1998, but the Department of Energy missed the deadline.)
The Federal government initially proposed developing one facility for disposal of high-level radioactive wastes in the western US, and one in the eastern states. In the 1980's, the Department of Energy considered three locations in Virginia for an east-of-the-Mississippi River site. The three Virginia locations were 209 square miles in Bedford County, 307 square miles on the border straddling both Halifax/Pittsylvania counties, and 64 square miles in Goochland, Hanover and Louisa counties.9
In 1986, the Reagan Administration decided to focus on the western site, choosing between Yucca Mountain, Nevada; Deaf Smith County, Texas; and Hanford, Washington. It dropped efforts to choose a site in the east, where choices had been narrowed to Virginia, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Carolina and New Hampshire. In 1987, Yucca Mountain in Nevada was selected after both scientific assessments and a political decision known in Nevada as the "screw Nevada" bill. Since 1987, opposition has delayed completion of Yucca Mountain and the repository for disposal of high-level radioactive wastes may never open.
Centralizing high-level nuclear waste waste will centralize the security, environmental, and other risks, including the political headache of determining which location in the United States will be a permanent "national sacrifice area" dedicated to maintaining nuclear waste in a safe condition for tens of thousands of years before radioactivity naturally declines to safe levels.
There may be an economy of scale that justifies centralization of nuclear waste management, but centralization will require transport of the waste from Virginia to Nevada. The preferred tranportation process involves placing waste in special casks that are supposed to be able to withstand accidents or terrorist attack, then shipping the casks on rail cars to Yucca Mountain. A railroad line built to the North Anna plant for its construction is still operational, but there is no rail connection to the Surry plant. Casks of nuclear waste from Surry will have to be shipped by truck, or by barge on the James River, to a rail line that will allow transport to Nevada.
