Diablo Canyon will go offline in 3 years — here’s what will happen to its recent spent fuel
Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant is roughly three years away from its scheduled closure, and decommissioning activities are ongoing — including deciding how the most recent nuclear waste will be dealt with once the plant goes offline in 2025.
On Wednesday, PG&E announced it has selected a vendor to transfer the remaining spent fuel at the plant to its onsite interim dry cask storage.
The utility company chose Orano USA, a regional subsidiary of the global Orano Group, to move the fuel from the spent fuel pools to the dry casks using its Extended Optimized Storage NUHOMS system.
Spent fuel, which is removed from the nuclear reactor core, is typically stored on site in “wet storage” — large pools of water that help to cool the material and give time for radioactivity to decay. Eventually they are transferred to nearby dry storage casks to await a long-term nuclear waste storage solution.
According to a PG&E news release, Orano is a “leading supplier of nuclear fuel materials, used fuel management, decommissioning, decontamination, radwaste treatment solutions and advanced reactor services to U.S. commercial and federal customers.”
Orano is involved in the ongoing decommissioning of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon, Vermont, and the Crystal River 3 plant in Crystal River, Florida.
The company’s dry storage system is licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and has been used to store spent nuclear fuel “for decades at more than 30 U.S. sites without incident,” according to the release.
The design to be used at Diablo Canyon includes “enhanced thermal and seismic capabilities” that will need extra safety reviews by the NRC, according to the release. Once approved, all spent fuel would be transferred to dry storage by 2027.
The company incorporated stakeholder input, including recommendations from the Diablo Canyon Decommissioning Engagement Panel, into its selection, according to the release. It also collaborated with the California Energy Commission and partnered with the B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences at UCLA for risk assessment regarding plans to transfer the spent fuel.
“These additional steps ensure a thorough process to mitigate risk and keep us, as a company, true to our stand that everyone and everything is always safe,” PG&E Vice President of Decommissioning Maureen Zawalick said in the release.
PG&E will continue to store spent fuel on-site until the federal government determines a permanent repository or another another licensed interim facility in the United States, according to the release.
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