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Home > Electronic Reading Room > Document Collections > Commission Documents > Commission Meetings, Slides, Transcripts, Meeting SRMs, and Full Written Explanation for Closed Meetings > 1997
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01/27/1997
1
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
***
BRIEFING BY DOE ON PLUTONIUM DISPOSITION
***
PUBLIC MEETING
***
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Commission Hearing Room
11555 Rockville Pike
Rockville, Maryland
Monday, January 27, 1997
The Commission met in open session, pursuant to
notice, at 2:30 p.m., the Honorable SHIRLEY A. JACKSON,
Chairman of the Commission, presiding.
COMMISSIONERS PRESENT:
SHIRLEY A. JACKSON, Chairman of the Commission
KENNETH C. ROGERS, Member of the Commission
GRETA J. DICUS, Member of the Commission
NILS J. DIAZ, Member of the Commission
EDGAR McGAFFIGAN, JR., Member of the Commission
. 2
STAFF AND PRESENTERS SEATED AT THE COMMISSION TABLE:
JOHN C. HOYLE, Secretary
KAREN D. CYR, General Counsel
HOWARD CANTER, Acting Director, Department of
Fissile Materials Disposition, DOE
DAVE NULTON, DOE
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P R O C E E D I N G S
[2:30 p.m.]
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Good afternoon, ladies and
gentlemen. The Commission would like to welcome Mr. Canter
and Mr. Nulton of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Mr. Canter, I understand, is Director of the DOE's Office of
Fissile Material Disposition.
Good afternoon, gentlemen.
MR. CANTER: Good afternoon.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: This afternoon, the Commission
will be briefed on, first, DOE's plans to implement a
program to provide for safe and secure storage of weapons
usable fissile materials, that is plutonium and highly
enriched uranium. And, secondly, on DOE's strategy for the
disposition of surplus weapons-usable plutonium.
This briefing is timely in that the Department of
Energy just last month issued its final programmatic
environmental impact statement on the storage and
disposition of weapons-usable fissile materials. The
Secretary of Energy announced her record of decision of this
matter less than two weeks ago on January 14, 1997.
The Commission is extremely interested in the
plans and strategies being considered by the Department of
Energy on this topic because the program could effect
facilities that the NRC has licensing and regulatory
. 4
authority over, such as commercial nuclear power reactors,
the high-level radioactive waste geologic repository and
possibly other facilities.
The Commission looks forward to hearing about your
plans, the Department's plans and strategies and,
particularly, how in your view those plans and strategies
might effect NRC's licensing responsibilities.
Unless the commissioners have any comments,
please, Mr. Canter, proceed.
And I understand Mr. Grumbly was called away.
MR. CANTER: Yes, he was. I want to apologize for
that last-minute perturbation.
I would like to cover a number of things. This is
a paper copy but we can also arrange for this to be, I
believe, on your screen.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Yes, that always happens.
MR. CANTER: All right.
I won't spend any time on this. Basically what I
want to cover is a little bit of background, what was in our
record of decision, how we are approaching the
implementation, some future interactions with the NRC that
we see and where we think there are some questions about
regulatory responsibility.
Next viewgraph.
The basic problem is what to do with the fissile
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material that is surplus to the national security needs. As
you know, the President declared about 174 metric tons of
highly enriched uranium to be surplus and approximately 50
metric tons of plutonium. Actually what was declared by the
President was 38.2 metric tons of plutonium but that was
strictly weapons grade and we have another 14 or so of non-
weapons grade also that we have declared surplus.
The decisions to be made. These involve the
locations for storage of plutonium and highly enriched
uranium and the technologies for the plutonium disposition.
And these were the basic decisions that were in the record
of decision that was approved on the 14th of January.
Next viewgraph.
This map briefly shows the storage decision. I
didn't intend to spend a lot of time on this but, basically,
through a process of consolidation and disposition of this
material, we're going to reduce from seven sites to three
where material will be stored. Those three sites that will
remain in the long term will be Oak Ridge, that's the Y-12
plant for highly enriched uranium, the Pantex plant for some
strategic reserve plutonium and Los Alamos National
Laboratory for some of the strategic reserve of plutonium
and for some material used in the research and development
programs.
On plutonium disposition, which is a dynamic
. 6
program, not static like storage, the record of decision
involved an approach that involved two tracks. One is
immobilization for minimum of eight metric tons of surplus
plutonium that is basically undesirable for use in mixed
oxide fuel. And the other is to fabricate the rest into or
part of it into mixed oxide fuel for reactor burning.
The amount that would go into either MOX fuel or
into immobilization is depending on a lot of things. One is
the technical work which we still have under way, the costs,
there are many institutional issues and last, and I want to
emphasize this one, is the international situation.
Because what we do is strongly dependent and
closely linked to whatever arrangement we work out in
bilateral agreement with Russia on what they're going to do
because this is not a unilateral decision. Some of it, we
may proceed unilaterally with. Some of the material. But
the bulk of it would await getting an agreement with the
Russians.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Could I ask a question
at that point?
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Sure.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: I was almost tempted to
make that point a couple slides earlier. The problem to
solve is how to dispose of our plutonium and the Russian
plutonium in some sort of way in parallel; is that correct?
. 7
MR. CANTER: Yes.
What we have done with the Russians is we have
conducted a joint study an, in that report, the Russians
agreed in the summary portion of it that the objective of
the two programs would be to reduce the amount of plutonium
to equal levels, to equal levels.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Do we know the starting
point of the Russians?
MR. CANTER: No. No.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: How do you --
MR. CANTER: Well, that's part of the negotiation
that will go on. But it's not equal rates. In fact, we
believe that the Russians have a great deal more surplus
than we have but they have never declared what's surplus.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: I've seen press reports
in the 125, 150 ton range but that's totally speculative?
It could be higher or lower?
MR. CANTER: Yes.
But if we want to get to equal levels, then it may
require one party to run a little faster than the other.
We think that the strongest negotiating position
that we are going to have is to proceed now with
preparations for implementing both tracks of this dual track
strategy. We are not going to study it for another two
years and do a down-select. We are going to proceed down
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both tracks.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Along the lines of the kinds of
negotiations, international, that you mentioned basically
with the Russians, have you attached a schedule or
milestones to this actual dual track strategy at this point?
MR. CANTER: To this?
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Yes.
MR. CANTER: Yes, we have an overall schedule for
it and I didn't bring it here today.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Could you just sort of describe
it in words?
MR. CANTER: Well, yes. For the immobilization
alternative, the biggest uncertainties are technical and we
have an R&D program.
For example, we don't know what impurities can be
dissolved in either a glass or a ceramic medium. The
experience in the United States, in fact in the world so far
is not with immobilization of plutonium but with high-level
waste. And the experiments we have done to date are with
pure plutonium or plutonium oxide and there are many, many
impurities that some of the forms have.
So we have to do a testing program and we've got
that started. It will be this year and next year
essentially to determine what impurity levels will be
tolerated.
. 9
Then there are other experiments that have to be
done on the final form. We have to down-select the -- if we
use the can-in-canister approach which I will describe in a
little while, what's in the cans, whether it is a ceramic or
a glass, and then of course we will have to go through a
design process to get whatever additional facilities we
would need up and running. So it will be the early part of
the next decade, sometime around 2003 before we would be
ready to start immobilization on a pilot scale. Until then,
it will be experimental scale, small scale.
On the MOX fuel alternative, the first thing we
have to do is go through a procurement process. There are
many utilities, there are many people who claim they know
how to fabricate fuel. So we will go through a competitive
procurement and we will probably start that in the end of
March and solicit contractors and proposals for development
of the MOX fuel plant and for utilities to propose using the
MOX fuel in their reactors.
That process of down-selecting that and going
through final proposals and all that you go through in the
government procurement process is scheduled for about 15
months. There are those who say it will take a lot longer,
there are those who say you could do it in less. But I
think that's a reasonable number.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: What about the FFTF facility at
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Hanford and how does that play in?
MR. CANTER: The FFTF is retained as a possible
facility for the production of tritium.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: I see.
MR. CANTER: This has nothing to do --
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Nothing to do with that?
MR. CANTER: That's correct.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Doesn't it burn
plutonium to produce the tritium?
MR. CANTER: It can make the tritium using uranium
fuel.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: But isn't it optimum --
as I understand the Jason Study, optimally you want
plutonium fuel in quite high concentrations.
MR. CANTER: There is a problem if we have
declared the plutonium surplus to national security needs.
The president -- to then use it for making bomb material.
And I think that will create a great deal of difficulty in
any negotiations with another nation.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: So this is an integrated
strategy here.
MR. CANTER: I am here to talk about plutonium.
[Laughter.]
MR. CANTER: I like to tell people that getting
rid of the plutonium is beating swords into ploughshares.
. 11
If you then produce tritium with it, you may be beating the
ploughshares back into spears and I don't want to get
involved with that at this juncture.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay.
MR. CANTER: To replace contracts, utilities will
have to apply for a license modification. We would have the
vendor who is developing the MOX fuel plant apply for a
license and I will get into this in a little bit.
It appears that the schedule for all that would be
that we would have people under contract in fiscal year --
sometime around the latter part of fiscal year 1998.
Probably the license applications would be fiscal year 1999
and it would then whatever time the licensing takes, the
critical path is actually getting the MOX fuel plant,
assuming that licensing takes about three years, which may
be an incorrect assumption, and then construction would be
about three years and then startup about a year, we would be
ready in about nine years from now to start consuming MOX
fuel in commercial reactors.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Could I go back to the
question about the Russians?
We're not going to do this unilaterally, you said.
As I understand it, the number of reactors that might be
coming in for license applications could range up to 12 to
15, if we only do one -- you know, 30 percent of the core is
. 12
MOX, if you go 100 percent it might be as few as three to
five.
In the Russian case, you're talking about if there
were 150 tons, almost all of their civilian reactors,
wouldn't you -- using MOX fuel, again, depending on whether
it's 30 percent or 100 percent MOX in their cores, I'm just
trying to -- and if our actions are dependent on Russian
actions, isn't there a huge amount of uncertainty as to when
indeed this might or might not occur?
MR. CANTER: yes, there is. In fact, in looking
at --
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: If anything I've just
said is wrong, please correct me.
MR. CANTER: No. No, it is. The Russians have --
what we have seriously looked at is the use of the VVR-1000
reactors. They have seven and I am not counting the ones
that are allegedly under construction that are promised to
be complete this year or next year. But there are seven in
existence.
In meetings with the Russians, they finally agreed
that there happens to be 11 in the Ukraine. So a year ago
they refused to talk about the 11 in the Ukraine. But since
they control the fuel supply for them and take back the
spent fuel, they have suddenly decided they want to stay in
that business, I presume, and they are now very much
. 13
interested in the 11 and they have had a dialogue with the
Ukrainians about this. So now you're talking about 18.
Now it starts to become reasonable that in some
reasonable number of decades we could do something about the
Russian plutonium. When you dealt with just the seven
reactors, you weren't going to get there.
What the Russians would really like is for us to
pay to build new reactors.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Of course.
MR. CANTER: Which nobody wants to do.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: How many U.S. reactors are we
talking about, potentially, and over what period of time?
MR. CANTER: Since all 50 tons wouldn't go the
reactor route anyway, let's say that two-thirds of it goes
that route, it would be the better quality material, we're
probably talking about somewhere between four and eight.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: What is the percentage
core?
MR. CANTER: We would start with about 30 percent
core because of the fact that there's no point jumping into
a new development program when you've got a lot of
experience in Europe.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: With 30 percent only.
MR. CANTER: With the 30 percent. And that will
allow us time in parallel to do further testing and lead
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test assemblies and whatever else has to be done so that if
we need to speed up, we could increase the loading and go to
full MOX cores or at least increase that percentage in
parallel.
But you might as well start with something that we
know how to do and where there is a substantial database of
information on performance.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Would the Russians also
start with 30 percent?
MR. CANTER: Yes.
The studies that we have done with them indicate
that even to do that, they would have to add control rods to
their reactors.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: So if the Russians are
doing 30 percent, they have maximum of 18 reactors to
utilize, what sort of phasing problems does that involve?
MR. CANTER: They could do in that with 30 percent
about four to five tons a year of plutonium.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: So if they had 150 tons,
that is 30 to 40 years?
MR. CANTER: It's a long time.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: And would you want to
finish our program at the same point they finished their
program in 30 to 40 years?
MR. CANTER: I think this is all going to be part
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of the negotiations.
The thing that is going to drive what gets done
over there is who is going to pay for it. Realistically.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay.
MR. CANTER: We mentioned the dual track strategy.
If you will move to the next --
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Let me ask you a question
before you get off of slide six. You anticipate in either
case both waste streams going to the same geologic
repository?
MR. CANTER: Yes. In fact, I want to address that
a little bit.
Since either the immobilized form or the spent
fuel from use in reactors would go to the geologic
repository, we have had as part of this program an analysis
done of the acceptability of these forms in the repository.
Since the repository does not yet exist and a firm standard
on what will be acceptable does not yet exist, the analysis
is concentrated on several things, one of which is to what
extent would these forms fit within the bounds of what
you're expecting to go there now, like the defense high-
level waste and the spent fuel from commercial reactors, LEU
spent fuel. And how far out of the envelope of that
material would it be.
In fact, we have made some adjustments. Looking
. 16
at underground criticality, we have had to reduce the amount
of plutonium in the immobilized form because of concern for
that. There is further analysis being done now of what we
call the degraded form phase, what happens in the repository
many, many years downstream and if this form degrades.
Because you've got a fairly -- in the immobilized
form, let's say we ended up with 5 percent. That's 5
percent fissile material and it doesn't do us much good to
wait until the Pu 239 decays because it decays to uranium
235, which doesn't help me much.
So we've got to make sure that there isn't a
criticality problem. So we have taken that on board and we
have in fact had the repository people themselves do this
analysis and any time you are interested in that material,
we can make it available to you.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: And so they are folding that
into their work in terms of the suitability of --
MR. CANTER: Of the repository.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: -- of the repository at this
stage?
MR. CANTER: Yes.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: How dependent is your choice
of either one of these tracks or the time table for the use
of either one of these tracks dependent upon resolving the
issues and getting a repository available?
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MR. CANTER: I don't believe the time table is
dependent on it at all. If we go with some MOX fuel into
existing reactors, we are substituting for LEU spent fuel,
so we are not creating more spent fuel. If the utilities
have a problem on where to send it, they have the problem
today. So we are not aggravating that problem.
With regards to the immobilization, and I will
come to that in a minute to describe the process we tend to
use, we don't create a lot more canisters of high-level
waste; we again substitute. There is some slight increase
in the number of the canisters but not the total quantity of
waste. So I don't think it is going to be that big an
impact.
We are presently vitrifying high-level waste at
Savannah River as we speak and, if there is no repository in
20 years, then Savannah River will have to keep those
canisters of high-level waste glass for some longer period
of time. And it won't make any difference whether there is
some plutonium cans in there or not. It may make a
difference in some institutional requirements like security
and safeguards but not in -- you know, if they have a place
to store it, it will be satisfactory.
I've got a sheet in here with just the definition
of the spent fuel standard because this is something that I
wanted to talk about just briefly. The National Academy of
. 18
Sciences in their report first I guess coined the phrase
"spent fuel standard" in early 1994. It is grossly
misunderstood. Most people think it is strictly a radiation
barrier. It is not. It is a combination of things such as
size, weight, chemical dilution of the plutonium, the
radiation barrier and, in some cases, isotopic dilution.
In the view of the Russians, their position is it
should have isotopic dilution -- or degradation, not
dilution. We don't think that's needed and if it were
needed as a mandatory requirement, then we couldn't go
immobilization at all because, in immobilization, you do not
change the isotopic mix of the plutonium.
So it's really sort of a region or a general
subjective measure of whether you've achieved this standard.
I want to talk about the plutonium conversion and
extraction. The first thing is that the form need for
plutonium disposition, whether it is immobilization or to go
into fuel for reactors is an oxide. Most plutonium
inventory, that's the bulk of the tonnage, is in the pits,
the plutonium component of the weapons. And that's metal so
it has to be processed.
We have developed a dry chemical process which we
are presently building into a prototype at Los Alamos for
testing. The construction of this prototype will be done
the end of this year and it's full-size equipment and it is
. 19
an integrated system.
This process will extract the plutonium from the
component by a hydride-dehydride process and then can
convert it to an oxide through several steps after that.
Since it's not an aqueous process, you don't have a waste
stream. There is a little bit of waste in terms of
deconning the can that you put the plutonium oxide in, but
that's not a big problem. That is why we are interested in
this.
Plutonium, one of the disadvantages of plutonium
in using it for anything is it does hydride very rapidly and
what we are doing is taking advantage of that.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Is this the point to
ask, the New York Times article this morning about the
gallium complications?
MR. CANTER: Well, you're free to ask that
whenever you want.
[Laughter.]
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: I mean, is Los Alamos'
process -- they are citing a Los Alamos paper in the
article. Is this the process where the gallium will
complicate things?
MR. CANTER: No.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Is it further
downstream?
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MR. CANTER: It's downstream. But let me explain
the gallium.
See, one of the unique features that we have at
our laboratories is that they have a certain degree of
academic freedom and they write a lot of papers, so we
applaud them for that.
But Gallium was added to some of the plutonium to
improve its machinability. Gallium is liquid at a very low
temperature and it makes the plutonium much more workable.
It is in the neighborhood of about -- approximately about a
percent.
By some strange coincidence, the Russians have
gallium in there too. I don't know who was first and I
won't comment on that.
So when you use this hydride-dehydride process,
whatever impurities are in the plutonium come with it. So
it does not purify the metal.
So if the gallium has to be removed, we would have
to add some steps to do that and either remove it with a
thermal process or chemically.
We have made some fuel with weapons plutonium and
we found out that in the fuel fabrication process, including
the centering that you do to fuel pellets, the gallium gets
reduced from about one percent down to about 20 parts per
million. Now that could create another problem because it
. 21
has to go somewhere. So where does it go in the centering
furnace and how do you condense it out without having it
redeposit on the fuel. And we are concerned, not that it's
a big problem, but we want to make sure it isn't a problem,
that even that 20 parts per million of gallium that's in the
fuel would not cause an interaction like an inter-metallic
compound with the cladding. It won't affect anything from a
neutronic point of view but it might be a corrosion problem.
So, as a result, we have undertaken a test program
and the first part is out-of-pile tests with the proper
temperatures to see what happens with gallium in contact
with zirc fours or two or whatever the different cladding
materials are. And the second part will be in-pile tests so
that you get the proper migration of the gallium under the
actions that will occur.
If we cannot substantiate that the gallium does
not create a problem, we will remove it. In the meantime,
in parallel, we have some development work on some thermal
processes to remove the gallium. So that's just a matter of
adding some steps, some additional glove boxes and spending
a little more money. We don't want to create a licensing
risk, though, and a safety risk.
Again, we could start off with plutonium that has
no gallium because a significant portion of even the pits
have plutonium that didn't have gallium added to it. So you
. 22
can start with that and it gives you a lot more time to work
out the methods of removing it and do more testing.
What we found in our work is that a substantial
portion of the effort is to prepare these materials for use
either as fuel or to go in the immobilized form and this we
didn't realize until we really took on the technical work of
the last two years and I think it was underestimated by the
National Academy of Science. In some cases, it's as much as
a third or 40 percent of the costs will be the preparation
of the materials.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Is there a significant
cost advantage potentially to the immobilization as opposed
to the MOX, because you have to do less of this
purification?
MR. CANTER: We don't know yet. We haven't tried
to immobilize any plutonium with impurities yet. And we're
just starting that now. So we just won't know.
The next viewgraph is sort of a cartoon of what we
call the ARIES process, which is this hydride-dehydride
process for removing the plutonium from the component and it
goes directly into a welded can which goes inside another
welded can. What's not shown here is it just has the words
"assay." We have a separate module that does an automated
nondestructive assay of the material in the can and whether
it's metal or an oxide and we think we can get it accurately
. 23
enough that that can be the start of international IAEA
safeguards.
We will not have a one-to-one correspondence
between pits and cans of material. Because that will reveal
how much plutonium is in a pit, which is still a classified
piece of information. So there will be about four-and-a-
half kilograms in each can. And we have shown the IAEA this
assay system and they agree that that could be a good
starting point because what we intend to do is place the
disposition of the surplus plutonium from the time it's out
of a classified form under IAEA safeguards, whether it's
immobilization or the reactor route.
This requires the IAEA, by the way, to step a
little bit out of their normal box where they are used to
drawing samples and analyzing them themselves. You've got
two very heavy welded cans here and I think the last thing
we want is a bunch of people cutting them open and exposing
plutonium oxide to the environment. So they have looked at
it, they think they can handle this, they think this is a
good way to go.
The next two charts, I won't go through in any
detail but just to show you that we've got this stuff in a
lot of locations and it's in a lot of forms. And these are
only the highest level classifications of the forms because
oxide isn't necessarily pure oxide. You know, metal isn't
. 24
necessarily pure metal. We've got some alloyed with
aluminum, we've got some alloyed with uranium. So it's all
over the place.
These are the 38 tons of weapons grade, the 14.3
tons of non-weapons grade. By the way, most of that is what
we call fuel grade and runs about 12 percent plutonium 240.
It isn't -- we've only got about a ton-and-a-half of real
reactor grade, which is up like 20, 25 percent Pu 240. But
you will also notice that almost 7 tons is in irradiated
fuel and unless that fuel is processed for other reasons,
we're not going to take the plutonium out of spent fuel for
the sole purpose of processing it so we can put it back into
spent fuel. So we will just leave that.
So what that adds up to is we've really got about
45 tons of material. We analyzed 50 tons because it allows
for some additional dismantlement which we think will occur
and that will be relatively clean stuff in metal.
The next cartoon is a process for preparation for
reactors. Depending on what the material is, it would
require different processes. I am not trying to go through
the whole flow sheet as we talk here but the idea would be
to produce a spec plutonium oxide.
Unlike LEU fuel, there is no ASTM spec for the
plutonium and there is a series of specifications that are
used in Europe. Each vendor claims his specification is
. 25
proprietary so we have developed a generic, by the way, that
we've gotten the vendors to take a look at. They say they
think that's acceptable.
But the interesting thing is, you know, the
experience came from plutonium that was recycled in their
reprocessing plants. So you sort of know what kind of
impurities you get and what you don't get. We may have a
different array of impurities than they are used to and, if
that's the case, then it just means we will have to do more
testing to make sure that we got the right spec on that.
I also have a cartoon for the processing for
immobilization. In this case, it says impure oxides because
we are hoping that the immobilization process will allow us
to be -- allow the system to be more robust and tolerate
more in the way of impurities.
I would like to talk a little bit about
immobilization. The next viewgraph, please, number 13.
What we are talking about is what we call the can-
in-canister. At Savannah River and planned for the Hanford
site, they immobilize high-level waste and it gets poured
into rather large canisters. They are about four meters
tall and about two feet in diameter and they are pretty big
and it's a homogenized system.
We found out that you can't -- that would require
construction of a new facility to use -- to do that with
. 26
plutonium because the melter, for example, at Savannah River
was never designed for criticality control, the systems are
too large, it would require gutting that facility and
putting new smaller equipment in and we don't want to do
that.
So we were looking for other ways out. Although
in our environmental analysis, we analyzed building a whole
new facility to get the worst case and one of the things we
came up with is this can-in-canister. And what we would do
is immobilize the plutonium in either glass or a ceramic and
it would not be mixed with high-level waste so you don't
need heavy shielded facilities, strictly glove box, and it
would be poured into small cans. They're about two liters.
We would then suspend these small cans, and some
number of them, and we have run a test with eight cans and
we've run a test with 20, in a framework that goes inside a
canister. Then that would be moved into the -- if it's at
Savannah River, the Defense High-level Waste Processing
Facility and the fission product glass would be poured into
the canister and it would surround these cans.
So it is not homogenous anymore and that raised
some other questions and we had a vulnerability assessment
done by an independent team of technical experts including
explosives experts and chemical processing people and a
concern came up that with the right explosive arrangement,
. 27
the shock wave would traverse the high-level waste glass,
reflect off the cans and it would separate the cans from the
glass and when this thing split open and then the
perpetrator could go in and pick up some cans and run out
with them.
So we are redesigning the can so it's not solid
anymore and it would be more friable and it's an easy thing
to do and we'll probably do some cold tests of that, just to
make sure you can't shatter it and separate it.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Could I ask, at the
Hanford site, is it the intention that that facility also
potentially be -- you mentioned it would be useful for this
purpose. Or would it only be at Savannah River? Would you
envision it both places if you needed to use the
immobilization option in both?
MR. CANTER: We have two candidate sites for
immobilization. One is Savannah River because they have an
immobilization facility and the other is Hanford because
they have definitive plans for getting one.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Right.
MR. CANTER: All the other sites don't have plans
at the present time.
If they build -- the present plans for the
privatized venture at Hanford is supposed to result in what
they call a pilot plant in about the year 2003 or 2004.
. 28
That pilot plant could handle something on the order of 100-
and-some-odd canisters a year. It's a pretty good size
pilot plant. And if they really are doing that much, that's
a possibility there, too.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: If they ever go on to
the next step at Hanford beyond the pilot plant --
MR. CANTER: Well, we could live with the pilot
plant; it's big enough.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: The pilot plant alone
would take care of your --
MR. CANTER: Yes. Yes.
If you would go back to the photograph a minute,
number 14. It's a little hard in the reproduced copy. In
the nice color one I've got, it shows a picture that was
sectioned.
We ran a cold test of this can-in-canister concept
to make sure that the glass could pour around the cans and
then we sectioned it to make sure there weren't any voids or
anything like that and it came out pretty well. This was
done before the Defense Waste Processing Facility went hot.
The next chart is a cartoon of a diagram that
shows the possible arrangement. And I think that's self-
explanatory.
The next viewgraph -- I want to talk about
reactors a little bit.
. 29
Oh, one other thing on the immobilization, if for
example we put 20 of these cans in one of these canisters,
it will displace about 20 percent of the high-level waste
glass that would have gone into that canister. So if
they're going to get rid of that high-level waste that's in
the tanks, it means for the ones that we're involved with,
and it may be 100 canisters a year, we would actually have
to pour the glass into 120 canisters.
So although they would have to handle 20
additional canisters, it is the same amount of high-level
waste glass, the feed. And that's one of the bigger
impacts.
The other thing would be that we would have to
have safeguards in security applied to these cans and to the
canisters at least until such time as the high-level waste
glass is poured around it. After that, whether we can give
any credit for the radiation barrier is not yet decided.
With reactors, of course, everybody is familiar
with what mixed oxide fuel is. You replaced the low
enriched uranium with a mixture of in the neighborhood of
something like 4 to 7 percent plutonium oxide and the
remainder being uranium oxide. In general, we would
probably want to use depleted uranium. We have a few
hundred thousand tons of that and we will be happy to use a
little bit of it up on this.
. 30
It requires a MOX fuel fabrication facility of
which there is none in the United States at the present
time.
We have an option that we retained of using the
Canadian reactors in the event there is a trilateral
agreement between Russia, Canada and the United States to do
so.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: I believe that DOE has
indicated that the MOX fuel for the CANDU, if that were to
occur, reactors would be fabricated in the DOE facility.
MR. CANTER: Yes.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Do you imagine having the same
facility fabricate both kinds of MOX fuel or are you really
talking separate facilities?
MR. CANTER: I don't think we would start a U.S.
light water reactor program and a CANDU program at the same
time.
Believe it or not, we are not going to have enough
plutonium to do all these things that everybody wants to do
so it would just -- it would cost an enormous amount of
money and it's just not worth it.
PRESIDING JUDGE: So it's a question of picking
which track you would take with respect to which kind of
reactor and then building the fabrication facility?
MR. CANTER: Well, our choice is U.S. light water
. 31
reactors. The advantage that the CANDU reactors brings is
that the Canadians actually proposed a two-sided program
where MOX fuel fabricated in the United States would go to
Canada and MOX fuel fabricated in Russia would go to Canada
and Canada, being a neutral nation and not a nuclear weapons
state, although they were at one time, would be the neutral
party that would take care of the material and would consume
the fuel in their reactors and would keep the spent fuel,
all under safeguards.
Now that is depending -- whether we would play in
that arena is dependent upon whether the Russians would. So
we are just preserving it as an option in the event the
Russians will sign up to that.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Could I ask a question
about the CANDU? I mean, in my reading of the various
documents that you all have put out, the CANDU option looks
like it has cost problems, nonproliferation problems, I
mean, just lots of problems compared to -- transportation
problems, obviously -- compared to the light water reactor
or immobilization.
Is it because we once made a positive sounding
signal to the Canadians when they made this proposal that we
are keeping it alive even though we don't believe in it or
what is the -- why keep the CANDU option alive given all the
disabilities that are enumerated in these various studies?
. 32
MR. CANTER: It has problems but it has one
possibility that the U.S. light water reactors -- in my
wildest dreams, I can't imagine the Russians ever sending
their plutonium to be consumed in U.S. reactors. That's the
one thing going for the CANDU option if they can bring the
Russian side to it.
The Canadian government is investing a little bit
of money in a study that is presently under way in Russia to
look at the infrastructure and other things in Russia to
handle that side of the triangle. But lacking the Russian
side, there is probably no way that the United States would
send its plutonium to Canada because we take on, like you
said, a great many other problems that aren't necessary when
we've got adequate resources to do it in the United States.
It's interesting because, you know, besides the
disarmament issue, one of the reasons some of the Canadians
are interested in it is it reduces their quantity of spent
fuel. See, they operate on natural uranium and really what
you do when you have MOX fuel is you get an enriched fuel
and you can about double the burn-up on the fuel, which cuts
the spent fuel in half. So we have told us they should
really pay us to let them do this.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Could I ask, just on
that point, what is the Canadian high-level waste and spent
fuel solution in the long run? Do they have one?
. 33
MR. CANTER: It's a little different in Canada
than here. And I'm not an expert on this, but in Canada the
spent fuel belongs to the utility forever. And it doesn't,
through some law or something, get turned over to the
federal government. So that means of the 20, of the 22
reactors, Ontario Hydro owns the spent fuel.
I also realize that in Canada, Ontario Hydro is
part of the -- somewhat part of the government of Ontario,
so it's hard to distinguish between the government and the
private sector but they have been studying repositories but
right now, just like we do, they store it at the reactor
sites.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Do they have any
candidate repository?
MR. CANTER: I don't know.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Not at this stage of the game.
MR. CANTER: There are some conditions on the use
of mixed oxide fuel and there has been a lot of controversy
over this and one of the things I would like to point out is
what the President's policy on the civil use of plutonium
really says.
The policy was issued September 27, 1993, the
current policy. There have been prior ones to this.
It says the United States does not encourage the
civil use of plutonium and therefore does not itself engage
. 34
in reprocessing. And the second phrase of that sentence is
extremely important.
So as a result, our commitment is there shall be
no reprocessing of this spent fuel. We also feel, so that
we don't try to encourage somebody to promote the civil use
of plutonium, that the MOX fuel facility that fabricates the
MOX fuel will be government-owned and on a government site.
And the MOX fuel use will be limited to surplus plutonium
disposition. There will be international inspection and
verification and it will be shut down when this mission is
complete.
In fact, we feel that even in placing a contract
with a contractor, that we may put words in the contract
that limit so that when that contractor applies for a
license, that that contractor must request that the license
must be limited to carrying out this mission so that we
don't have a situation where either a utility gets a license
for use of MOX fuel, they finish with our plutonium and they
go by MOX fuel in Europe. We don't want that. And we don't
want that opportunity.
We know of nobody who wants to do that, by the
way.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Would you expect us to
have that as a license condition, binding license condition?
MR. CANTER: I would expect that the parties
. 35
applying for the license, the applicant, will specify that
as a condition and we would hope that you would approve that
as a condition.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Or conversely have it as a
condition.
MR. CANTER: Yes.
The siting of the disposition facilities, I
mentioned before, for immobilization, we're just looking at
Hanford and Savannah River. For the mixed oxide fuel
fabrication, we are looking at four sites, Hanford, Idaho,
that's at the INAL site, Pantex and Savannah River and for
either approach, the pit disassembly and conversion will
either be at Hanford, Idaho, Pantex or Savannah River.
We are doing a supplemental or tiered-off EIS so
that we can select the sites for this and we are about to
start that. It probably will get started in the next month
and probably in March we will announce the notice of intent
on that. It is a straightforward EIS just to pick the
sites.
With regards to coverage under NEPA, of course, if
you look at our programmatic EIS, we handled the reactors
generically. That will be a competitive procurement and
when the reactor owner or licensee applies for a license
modification from the NRC, they will have to update their
environmental report and whatever has to be done. I think
. 36
the generic look that we had provides a substantial amount
of information on the environmental effects of using MOX
fuel versus LEU fuel and, as I recall, the delta caused by
the MOX fuel is extremely small.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Could I ask, on the
timing, when you put out your request for proposals, you are
going to look for plants that do not require a license
renewal in order to be relevant in the time period that
you're talking about?
MR. CANTER: Yes.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: What other conditions
may you put in your RFP for the sorts of reactors that you
would be willing to contemplate?
MR. CANTER: Well, I should have brought a chart
that I usually lug around with me but it shows all 109
reactors and when they fall off the table at their end of
license.
Even if we eliminate any that would reach end of
license during the potential campaign, there are probably
still 40 or 50 that we wouldn't have to get into any license
extension. So I believe that might be one of the
requirements we would examine.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: I just want to -- if the
Russian case were to be 150 tons and 40 years, there almost
is no reactor that will be -- and you got into some of those
. 37
reactors being shut down for periods of time for safety
reasons or whatever, there is -- don't you -- I think I can
contemplate a set of circumstances where there -- you are
into license renewal almost necessarily depending on how
much Russian reactor -- how much Russian excess plutonium
there really is.
MR. CANTER: Well, we always have a fallback and
now you are describing our strategy. We are going to be
immobilizing high-level waste at Hanford for probably 30 or
40 years. Less at Savannah River.
So, if we run out of reactors, clearly we can go
the other route.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: So perhaps another way would be
to say it is that you would be looking at reactors that, in
your best estimate, would not require license renewal during
the life of the campaign?
MR. CANTER: That's correct.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: But, should that occur and/or
should you decide for other reasons that the reactors that
might come to the end of their licenses, their current
licenses, might be desirable, that at any rate your fallback
position of the immobilization allows you to deal with it.
MR. CANTER: Yes.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: And you would switch over to
that track?
. 38
MR. CANTER: Yes.
I think the decision on whether a reactor license
gets renewed and its life extended is a commercial decision
for the reactor owner and has to do with electric power
production and other things and it should not be dependent
upon this. We are not in this effort trying to solve the
nation's energy problems.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: And you aren't necessarily --
you aren't looking to have a built-in pressure or
implication of extending the license of any given reactor?
MR. CANTER: Not at all.
The next viewgraph is just a few ideas on some
facilities and functions that might potentially involve NRC
action. The reactors are very clear. You are the licensor.
The reactor operator is the licensee and if they are going
to change the fuel to MOX fuel, they would need some kind of
license modification.
The MOX fuel facility where it would be
fabricated, we would like that to be NRC licensed.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Does that require legal change,
the law, a change in the law?
MR. CANTER: There is one issue that has to do
with that and that's this DOE ownership. If, for example,
we contract with a contractor, a fuel fabricator, whoever
that may be, to design, license, construct and start up and
. 39
run this facility, it would not be our conventional M&O
contract type arrangement. We might -- we would pay for all
that to be done, that's the up-front investment cost. And
we would own it and we might lease it to the contractor who
then fabricates fuel for the contracted utilities under
contract from those utilities so the guarantees of fuel
performance, of delivery, of quality and of all the other
issues that are involved are the same as they are today
between the utility and their fuel fabricators.
So rather than have the fuel be government-
furnished, what we would furnish is to the fuel fabricator
plutonium oxide and uranium oxide if they want it or uranium
in some form that they could convert.
If you had a facility like that, where it is
operated by a private entity who is the licensee but the
United States Government is the owner of it, would we have
to be a co-licensee? That's the question. In the case of
the gaseous diffusion plants, they're not really licensed;
they're certified. So I couldn't use that as an example.
So I don't know what the answer to that is.
If DOE would have to be the co-licensee, then I
think it would take some legislation to give you the
authority to license something that belongs to DOE.
Transportation. We have proposed to some of your
staff and have taken the position that we would transport
. 40
the plutonium to the disposition site, whether it's the MOX
fuel fabrication plant or the immobilization by safe, secure
trailer, the SSTs that we own. We have 52 of these. We are
building more to replace some of the older ones. That is a
very good infrastructure, its very well recognized and it
provides a lot of security and safety and has many, many
features that I can't talk about in an open meeting.
One of the questions is, if the MOX fuel
fabrication plant were NRC licensed and the reactor is NRC
licensed, do you have a link in the middle that is the
transport of the MOX fuel that is not NRC licensed because
it's under DOE? Or should the NRC also license, at least
for this purpose, the safe, secure trailer system?
We feel that it provides a lot of advantages to
use that system rather than to try to create an
infrastructure for doing this in the private sector.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Could I -- the trailers
that I am a little familiar with were designed for a
different purpose. They can take long fuel assemblies
and --
MR. CANTER: Yes.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: -- they can, you know,
you can pull them out when you get to the reactor and load
them in the spent fuel pond and all that?
MR. CANTER: Yes. There happens to be a container
. 41
for MOX fuel and for some unknown reason in the dim distant
past, there's one. And when this container was designed, it
was designed to go on a flat bed truck. So it provides, the
container provides, all the ballistic protection and all the
other things. It is enormous and, in fact, you could only
put one of these containers with two fuel assemblies in a
trailer. So we would need thousands of sorties.
We are designing a container that takes advantage
of the protection provided by the trailer so it becomes
quite similar to the kind of container that you put LEU fuel
in and it will be tested and certified and whatever has to
be done. But the SSTs are large enough for this.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay.
MR. CANTER: It's too bad Tom isn't here. He was
the chairman of our Task Force on External Regulation. I
was a member of it. And so I'm familiar with some of the
things that the Department has recommended but, you know, it
is possible if the recommendations that are in the report
from that task force and were approved by the Secretary, if
they are codified in law by the Congress, some program to
give the NRC increased authority over DOE facilities that
the NRC would take on the regulatory authority of these
other facilities like the pit disassembly and conversion,
the immobilization facilities, just about the time that we
would be getting started.
. 42
So if the Congress is going to act, and that
report had a two-year time frame in the schedule for the
Congress to act and then ten years to reach full
implementation. If they are acting, if they will act
favorably on this, it would be better to bring the NRC in
early rather than to try to back into it as a retrofit.
Since some of this will be new facilities or new additions
to existing facilities, it would be appropriate to bring the
NRC in to the review process in the design phase.
I am just pointing this out. I don't know what
the answer is. It's a subject that I think none of us have
the answers to.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: What about the storage of the
fissile material?
MR. CANTER: Well, the same might be true with the
storage. The storage is very simply this. Right now, the
decision consists of moving as reasonably quickly as we can
the material out of the Rocky Flats site. There are pits at
Rocky Flats. The pits will start this year to be shipped to
the Pantex site where we have many thousands of pits now and
they have ample storage capability. There will be some
upgrading of facilities there over a period of time.
The non-pit material will be shipped but it won't
be shipped until several conditions are met but it would go
to the Savannah River site. Savannah River is building and
. 43
they have started design work on what they call the Actinide
Packaging and Storage Facility. It is a new storage
facility. it is more than just a vault because you have to
have the ability to repackage and do other things with the
material.
What we are going to do is to expand that design.
It is modular. Add some modules, several thousand
additional positions, so it could take the non-pit materials
that are from Rocky Flats.
The material that is presently at Idaho and at
Hanford will await our decision on location of the
disposition options and it will then be -- rather than have
to ship it twice, ship it to the location where the
disposition would be done.
But the new facility at Savannah River, if the NRC
is given authority over these kinds of facilities, would be
the first new storage facility to be created and that's
scheduled to be on line about 2002.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Let me ask you this question,
going back for a second to the MOX fuel facility because you
kind of laid out a potential structure that is a little more
simple to think about from the commercial perspective.
You indicate an NRC license is desired and you
talked about how that might occur, depending upon who owns
and what, et cetera. Why, in your mind, is it desirable to
. 44
have an NRC license? Is it because of this interface with
the commercial sector? But what advantage do you --
MR. CANTER: It's several things. One is we think
that there is value to the NRC license and we think many in
the public feel there is value to the NRC license. That's
one point.
The second thing is we are going to contract for
it to be run in a manner that is similar to the way fuel
fabricators run today. And they are all licensed and there
is a contractual relationship between their product quality
and so forth and the requirements of the reactor users. So
it keeps it in the same arena where we are reasonably
comfortable and where I believe the utilities are
comfortable and rather than try to create a whole new arena,
a new regime, untested, that it just seems to us that this
is -- this would be the proper way to do it.
Now, you know, if there are reasons not to, then
it is another thing we could take a look at.
I have a sheet here on page 20 that is just a few
other issues on where the NRC might be engaged. As you are
aware, for a small test up at the NRU reactor at Chalk
River, Los Alamos had applied for an export permit to ship
this small quantity of fuel and we decided that the prudent
thing would be to wait until our record of decision and so
that was withdrawn until preparation of an environmental
. 45
assessment of the shipment to make sure that there is no
environmental consequences that are unacceptable.
That is presently in draft form. We are in the
process of going to review that shortly and then that will
be sent to the affected states and Indian tribes. and then
if that's -- whatever comments we receive, it would be
modified. And, if it warrants it, we would have a finding
of no significant impact.
If we have such a finding, they would then apply
for the export permit. But not until such time as we
satisfy the environmental consequences.
So that could happen, that application, in two to
three months. I mentioned before the initiation of the
reactor license modification. Maybe two to three years from
now. And the application of the MOX fuel plant, two to
three years.
There is another issue that has its own problems
and that is the possible use of a European fabrication
capability to make leak test assemblies. A lot of this is
going to depend and will require significant consultation
with your staff. We don't know to what extent LTAs will be
required and nobody wants to say one way or the other and I
can understand that.
If we have to wait until the MOX fuel plant is
complete and producing -- can produce fuel and then first
. 46
make LTAs that could be tested in a reactor, we are
extending this schedule. So one way to cut three, maybe
four years off the schedule is to ship sufficient amount of
plutonium oxide under many, many controls and safeguards and
security to the appropriate manufacturer in Europe, have the
LTAs fabricated there and ship them back.
Of course, that raises -- solves one problem and
creates three or four more. So we are looking for ways --
right now, the only capability to make MOX fuel is a
relatively small capability at Los Alamos. That is all we
have in the United States.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Could I ask, the record
of decision on this point says, the careful placement of the
word "not," "This record of decision does not decide to do
this." It doesn't say "we have decided not to do this."
MR. CANTER: That's correct.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: So what would be the
mechanism for that decision? There would be a further
record of decision required based on the same environmental
record already created?
MR. CANTER: Yes.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: And that would not
require any further process, public process?
MR. CANTER: Well, there would probably be some
public announcement of revised record of decision or a
. 47
subsequent one and you allow usually a small comment period
on that, 30 days or something.
But, you know, we understand the problems.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: They are discussed in
some detail here.
MR. CANTER: So we are looking for a way out of
that, but I don't know what the answer is yet. But we just
want to let you know that is something we are looking at.
I have just got a couple of suggestions here. We
need to establish a working group, obviously, between the
department and the Commission to clarify the regulatory
responsibilities because, in some respects, we are doing
some things that are a little bit out of the normal.
The reactors, I don't think, are a big problem.
The MOX fuel plant is under the aegis of 10 CFR 70 and I
know, in talking to your people, they even have a draft
standard review plan but I don't know whether you need
rulemaking or what's going to be so only you and your staff
can determine that.
The question of the definition of high-level
waste, it was an interesting -- Commissioner McGaffigan's
comment. If these canisters contain plutonium, does the
statutory definition of high-level waste still cover it?
And I am neither an attorney nor an expert on this subject
so I think there are a number of things.
. 48
The transportation I mentioned. The evolving
external regulation and oversight of the Department of
Energy, however that comes out. And I mentioned the
rulemaking for security of fresh fuel reactor sites.
This is the kind of little thing that comes up.
For example, and it's solvable but every one of these
details has to be worked out.
I believe the licenses that the utilities and
others have do not permit them to use deadly force to
protect material but only to protect human beings and the
health and safety of the public. I don't -- that's my
understanding. Because a lot of their authority to use
firearms comes from local law enforcement and so forth, the
states.
Under DOE rules, the people providing security for
nuclear materials can use the deadly force to protect the
material. So if we have fresh fuel arriving at a reactor
site and it is going to be stored there at least a few days
before it goes into the reactor, to what extent can deadly
force be used because the difference between MOX fuel and
LEU fuel basically is simply that if somebody acquires the
MOX fuel, they can chemically separate the plutonium from
the uranium matrix. While with LEU fuel, they cannot do it
without an enrichment capability, the fissile material.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Can I also ask that
. 49
this -- I had some discussions with former Commissioner
Gilinsky about this. You, up to this point, including with
the use of the weapons transports, have maintained a stored
weapons standard for the fuel.
Would the nature or size of the guard force also
change for that period of time before the fuel is loaded?
You mentioned deadly force.
MR. CANTER: At the reactor.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: At the reactor. Because
the stored weapons standard is something -- I mean, I'm not
sure what that means. Maybe you're not sure what it means
either but the stored weapons standard strikes me as what
you have at defense facilities today and what you will have
had up to that point it is delivered at the reactor.
So do you have a paramilitary force armed to the
teeth ready to take on, you know, some threat?
MR. CANTER: This is one of the questions. First
of all, much to the surprise of a lot of people, the stored
weapons standard does not mean a military escort.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Right.
MR. CANTER: It's an armed escort.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: It's a heavily armed
escort.
MR. CANTER: Well, I can't talk about how heavy or
light, not in this forum. But this is an issue.
. 50
We have allowed for one of the costs in our cost
estimate of what it would take to do things at a utility
that there would probably be increased security. The
utility may require some modification to the location where
they store fresh fuel. Some of them, since they are
different depending on which reactor you look at, it would
depend on which are the ones that win the contract, and if
there is added costs we would have to cover that added cost.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: So that is not a
contracting selection criterion. It is something that will
be an added cost you just pay when you know it?
MR. CANTER: Yes. It -- we wouldn't make that a
discriminator in selecting who are the best utilities to
carry out whether we have to spend a few dollars here and
there for additional guard force.
But this is an interesting point and you get into
details, Commissioner, that, you know, if the SST arrives at
the gate and there is DOE guards and they're armed, can they
take it all the way in to the loading dock? And it is all
these little details that get very interesting. And if you
think it's interesting on that, just try crossing the border
to Canada.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Right. That was one of
the points on Canada.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Are there questions?
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Commissioner Rogers?
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: No, I don't have any
specific questions.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Commissioner Dicus?
COMMISSIONER DICUS: One more question.
Presumably, considering the MOX fuel option and the ultimate
use of it in a power reactor, some anticipation that the
waste stream, the commercial waste stream, low-level waste
stream might change, for example the potential that there
would be true waste, commercial true waste.
Any thought about where that might be disposed?
MR. CANTER: Well, you know, our plans are to
dispose of true waste at WIPP. That's assuming there is a
WIPP.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: So it would probably be able
then to go to WIPP?
MR. CANTER: Yes.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Okay.
MR. CANTER: And if there were any -- you know, in
the event you have a leak or something like that, and you
had a problem with that, that may be one of the conditions
we would have to accept in contracting. But you could have
plutonium in low-level waste now with LEU fuel. Why would
it be different.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Commissioner Dicus?
. 52
COMMISSIONER DICUS: I am surprised, I don't have
any questions.
[Laughter.]
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Commissioner McGaffigan, any
further questions?
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: I just ask one maybe
large question. If I am a utility trying to figure out how
to bid when you put this out for bid, there is a huge amount
of instability. I think we have only touched the tip of the
iceberg here today.
One of the things I understand will be conditioned
is that the utility will have to have an LEU supply
available rather than the MOX supply, if we get out of phase
with the Russians.
A lot of the instability comes from figuring out
how to stay in phase with Russians. How does a utility bid?
They don't know their security requirements, they don't know
when they are going to be asked to put MOX fuel in, they
don't know when they will be told, no, don't put MOX fuel
in, put LEU fuel in. They are facing a deregulated
environment where they are trying to compete.
What am I bidding for if I am a utility?
MR. CANTER: Well, I can't instruct a utility how
to bid because it is going to be a competitive process. But
I think a lot of these uncertainties can be eliminated with
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the proper legislation and, in fact, what I'd like to see is
that the thing that drives this engine is an international
treaty between us and the Russians. Even legislation is
readily changed by the Congress, the Congress giveth; it can
taketh away. But the Congress is very reluctant to modify
year to year something required by a treaty once they've
ratified that treaty.
So that would be the best of all worlds and would
provide tremendous stability. Nobody said they had to
maintain an LEU supply. We don't know that. That may be
what some claim. There is a way if things speed up or slow
down, and this is another reason for the dual track, that we
can handle increases in throughput and decreases in
throughput without impacting the utilities and that is use
the immobilization alternative for that, which is totally
within our control.
In other words, we do what utilities always should
have done, base load nuclear power plants, don't try to use
them for peaking plants and use something else for a peaking
plant. That is one of the advantages of the dual track.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: The other fundamental
question, again it goes to the Russians, and maybe a lot of
this would be solved by a treaty but it takes us a long time
to negotiate treaties and sometimes even longer to get them
ratified by two-thirds of the Senate. But if you -- as I
. 54
understand, a main motivation, from reading all these
documents, for choosing the MOX option as opposed to
immobilization alone is to try to influence Russian policy
and to get them to behave somewhat similarly to us with
regard to first consuming their weapons plutonium, not
reprocess, et cetera.
What conditions are we looking at getting out of
the Russians as a result of us really, you know, raising
questions about our civil plutonium policy, which we have
had for two decades?
MR. CANTER: There has been a start of dialogue,
which actually had started a couple of years ago in a couple
of summits. But it started heating up in April of this past
year in the Moscow Nuclear Safety Summit, which addressed
this question of plutonium disposition in very broad terms
but then called for an experts' meeting in the fall and the
experts' meeting occurred in Paris, the end of October. I
was a member of that delegation. Eric Newsome from the
State Department was the head of the delegation.
At that meeting, the United States provided
several conditions, nonproliferation conditions on its
support of a MOX option in Russia. One was that the spent
fuel would not be recycled. In fact, the words were "at
least until all the separated plutonium is consumed." The
other was that any MOX fabrication capability created would
. 55
be used only for this mission and that is getting rid of
their military plutonium.
The Russians tried to resist this very strongly.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: With the help of the
Europeans, as I understand it.
MR. CANTER: Well, the French supported them. But
others were on our side so it came out sort of a compromise
that this is a statement written into the record by the
United States and we have made it very clear to the other
nations that we are standing by this position.
One of the things that we feel very strongly about
is that the Russians will -- at best probably will
immobilize a small portion of their plutonium and then it
would only be the material that is of lesser value, but that
they feel very strongly that they have spent their national
treasure creating it and they want to get some economic
value back.
If we are going to play a role in dictating how
that's done, then we are going to have to be in that arena
and that's another reason for the dual track strategy.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: The heart of my question
was, given that meeting and given the degree to which we
were isolated on some of these points, what if we don't get
any of those conditions and yet we end up with MOX in our
plants in this country? So we end up -- I can see a
. 56
negotiation where we end up with the worst of all possible
worlds, where we are on a MOX track at least for part of our
program, the Russians are on a major MOX track with no
constraints and the Europeans, who have opposed our policy
on plutonium and reprocessing and MOX fuel for civilian
purposes are cheering from the sidelines and claiming that
we have -- am I creating a negotiating possibility that is
unlikely?
MR. CANTER: I think what you are missing is the
fact that we are not going to have any MOX fuel in our
reactors for eight or nine years.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Right.
MR. CANTER: If we can't get a deal negotiated
with the Russians in eight or nine years, then I don't think
we are going to do anything with our plutonium but store it.
And I am very serious about that.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Right.
MR. CANTER: Because we will never be able to sell
up on the Hill spending a lot of money to do something with
ours unilaterally.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: On that note, I want to thank
you very much, Mr. Cantor and Mr. Nulton. This has been a
very informative briefing on a subject that clearly has both
national and international significance inasmuch as it
involves the balance of views, what some would view as a
. 57
change in U.S. civil plutonium policy an balancing that
against clear nonproliferation goals.
The Commission recognizes the Administration's
view of the importance of this program to this country as
well as to other nations around the world and the need to
successfully address the broad goals and objectives of the
program. And, as such, you know, the issues are complex and
the Commission itself is beginning to think about how it
should respond and prepare for the potential for change. So
that if, in fact, this program proceeds that it succeeds in
the sense of progressing the right way.
So the Commission would request, and this is
consistent with your own suggestion, that you keep an open
line of communication with the NRC staff on these activities
and this is necessary because of the technical issues, some
of which you have raised, funding issues as well as any
legal ones that maybe need to be addressed, including
enabling legislation.
And if a joint working group or task force is to
be established, it would need to be addressed, we believe,
in a memorandum of understanding which folds in aspects of
initiatives already under way with DOE with respect to the
high-level waste geologic repository, the Hanford tank waste
activities as well as any activities we are beginning with
DOE regarding external regulation of DOE nuclear facilities.
. 58
So, again, I think that is the track that would
make sense. So, again, the Commission would like to thank
you for taking the time to come and brief us on what we both
obviously agree is a very important subject.
MR. CANTER: Thank you.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: We are adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:07 p.m., the briefing was
adjourned.]
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