(November 8, 1991) Over the next 25 years, more than half the nuclear power plants in the US will become 40 years old.
(361.3572) WISE Amsterdam - When they do, their operating licenses will expire. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's new chairperson, Ivan Selin, has listed establishing a procedure for extending the licenses of those plants as one of his priorities. The details are now being debated in the NRC.
With no reactors on order and only two under construction, the US nuclear industry could well depend on continued operation of existing plants for its survival. It should also be noted that if the extensions are not approved, the utilities will have to develop decommissioning plans. Thus, extending the operating licenses has another important aspect: allowing utilities to postpone the costly business of disposing of retired reactor's radioactive parts.
The 110 nuclear power reactors now in operation generate about 20% of US electricity. Between the years 2000 to 2016, the licenses of 66 of these reactors will expire. Anti-nuclear activists say this is the time to phase out plants that do not measure up to safety regulations made after they were built.
According to Matthew Wald, writing in The New York Times, the original idea of a 40-year license apparently had little to do with technical issues. The industry claims that in the early years of nuclear power, the Atomic Energy Commission (NRC's pre-decessor) decided on 40 years because that was the time span commonly used by utilities for depreciating plants for accounting purposes. But critics say that once utilities knew they had a 40-year license, many of the plants were designed to last that long.
Because older plants were not expected to operate for a long time, they did not have to be modernized to meet the same standards as new ones do today. Robert Pollard, a safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), points out that if the owners of Yankee Rowe were to build a duplicate of their plant next door to the original, it would not be allowed to open. If the design does not meet current standards, he asks, why should it be allowed to operate for another 20 years. Critics also question whether some of the older plants even meet the safety requirements they were supposed to meet when they were built.
Temperatures are a factor in the debate. The UCS says that safety equipment installed in Unit 1 at Nine Mile Point in New York, was designed to withstand a normal operating temperature of 150 degrees. The actual normal operating temperature has been 20 to 30 degrees higher. UCS also says the NRC has acknowl-edged that it has had difficulty determining which regulations apply to which plants, and which plants fail to comply. Also relevant to the issue is how long some parts will survive. Cables deteriorate with age but are nevertheless generally not inspected closely. Pipes erode and are not found in inspections. (For instance, in 1986 at Unit 2 of the Surry plant in Virginia, a large pipe ruptured, killing four workers, after years of erosion had gone unnoticed.)
And at other aging plants, years of neutron bombardment has increased the brittleness of their reactor vessels.
Of the 126 US reactors put into commercial operation thus far, 16 have been abandoned far short of their 40th birthdays. Indian Point-1 in New York, for example, was closed down in 1974, after only 12 years of operation, because federal regulators added a new requirement for an emergency cooling system. The utility decided it was impractical to add one. Dresden-1 in Illinois closed in 1978, after 19 years, because it was so highly contaminated with radioactivity. The 13-year-old Seco plant in California was closed in 1979, after the municipal utility district that owned it was forced to call for a referendum. The district's residents said they didn't want it.
The Yankee reactor in Massachusetts, though, was seen by the industry as a reactor that has operated "reliably", which was why it was chosen to apply first for a license extension. With the Yankee reactor shut down, the industry's next candidate is likely to be the Monticello reactor, a 564 MW boiling water reactor in Minnesota.
Sources: The New York Times (US), 24 June and 23 July 1991 (via GreenNet).