By EVAN BRANDT
Journal Register News Service

LIMERICK — Exelon Corp. has applied for government permission to begin shipping some of the low-level radioactive waste generated at the Limerick Nuclear Generating Station to its Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in York County.

The request to modify the license at Peach Bottom was filed with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Jan. 6.

The waste in question is not the highly radioactive spent fuel rods which Limerick has been storing on-site since it first opened in 1986. The second unit opened in 1990.

The waste is classified by the NRC as "Low-Level Radioactive Waste" and is generally things like shoe coverings, mops, wiping rags, filters, tools and reactor water treatment residues that have become contaminated by contact with radioactive material or become radioactive themselves through exposure to neutron radiation, said NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan.

The NRC further classifies this waste as being of A, B or C grade. Grade A emits the lowest level of radiation, with the other two classes emitting higher levels.

All nuclear plants have facilities to store this waste and Limerick is no different, said Joseph Szafran, a spokesman for the Limerick plant, located off Sanatoga Road.

In fact, Limerick has the capacity to store its grade B and C radioactive waste on-site until 2012 and beyond, Szafran said. But that may not be long enough.

Driving Exelon's request is a nationwide shortage of facilities that accept radioactive waste.

On July 1, 2008, the nearest such facility, located in Barnwell, S.C. and owned by Energy Solutions, was ordered by South Carolina to close its gates to radioactive waste from any state not part of Atlantic Interstate Low-level Radioactive Waste Management Compact Commission, which is comprised of South Carolina, Connecticut and New Jersey.

The only other similar facility in the nation is in Richland, Washington State, which serves 11 states on the west coast and in the Rockies and restricted its waste to those in its two compact, Sheehan said.

Another facility may be built in Texas, but currently low level nuclear waste from 36 states has no final resting place.

Sheehan said Exelon's application to ship Limerick's waste to Peach Bottom is the first in NRC Region One, which oversees nuclear operations in the northeast and mid-Atlantic states from Maryland to Maine, but it may not be the last.

"This is not a new issue," Sheehan said. "For a while Barnwell was willing to accept waste from states not in the Atlantic Compact and in the meantime, there was an effort to find towns willing to host a facility, but there weren't any volunteers."

With Barnwell closing its doors to all but members of its compact, plants throughout the 36 states not part of any compact will soon begin grappling with the issue of class B and C waste.

Less of a concern is the class A waste, which is accepted at another Energy Solutions facility, this one in Clive, Utah.

Exelon, which operates 17 nuclear reactors around the country, is among those companies that must find a place to dispose of, or store, its more radioactive waste.

The Jan. 6 application suggests one solution it is now exploring is to consolidate some of it at one plant.

Peach Bottom began commercial operation in 1974, much earlier than Limerick and, in apparent anticipation of having to store its waste on-site, built a large facility to do that, Szafran said.

Although the Peach Bottom storage was designed mostly for class A waste, because that waste is now shipped to Utah, it has room for class B and C waste, both its own and Limerick's, Exelon contends.

It can store the waste from both plants for as long as 44 years, Szafran said.

He also noted that Exelon has made great efforts to reduce the amount of radioactive waste it generates, in part due to the difficulty of disposing of it. If the volumes can be further reduced, the lifespan of Peach

Bottom's storage facility may be extended even further, Szafran said.

Waste reduction is not restricted to Exelon, Sheehan said. All nuclear plant operators face the same dilemma and all have made strides toward reducing their waste.

"There is a much greater degree of planning that goes into every activity in order to reduce the things that get contaminated," Sheehan said.

The license application notes that Exelon examined the possibility of building a similar waste storage facility at its Limerick facility, but concluded it would be more cost-effective to ship it to Peach Bottom, located about 50 miles southeast of Harrisburg.

Szafran said the cost to build a similar facility in Limerick would be "in the millions of dollars," but said if the NRC denies Exelon's request to send it to Peach Bottom, the company may have no other choice.

Exelon's third-quarter income rose by 8 percent to $757 million, but dropped 18 percent in the fourth quarter, earning only $581 million, according to the Associated Press. In 2009, it cut expenses by $22 million and cut 500 jobs.

Exelon's application argues that since Limerick's low-level waste previously had to be transported 710 miles to Barnwell, taking it only 80 miles to Peach Bottom "thus poses less of a risk to the public."

Szafran was asked if, following Exelon's own logic, keeping Limerick's waste in Limerick doesn't pose the least risk of all to the public.

He would say only that low-level radioactive waste materials such as this are shipped all over the country and that the safety record, particularly given the resilience of the HDPE plastic containers in which the waste is stored, makes shipping it to Peach Bottom "not an issue."

The facility at Peach Bottom will not need to be re-built or altered in order to hold the more radioactive waste, Sheehan said. The license application said the placement of more radioactive waste in the center of the facility reduces the radiation exposure to acceptable levels outside.

The Peach Bottom site can hold 520 containers in 35 separate cells, according to the application. Each cell has 14-inch thick concrete walls and a 24-inch concrete cap. The entire facility also has "36-inch concrete shield walls on the peripheral wall."

The application estimates that the radiation dose at "the nearest restricted boundary" when the facility is "filled to capacity" would be less than the limits specified by the NRC.

The application estimated the off-site radiation dosage from the facility would be one millirem per year. The NRC limit is 25 millirems per year.

Sheehan said the human body is generally exposed to 360 millirems every year "from natural and man-made causes."

By way of comparison, he said a chest X-ray is eight millirems; a mammogram is 138 millirems and watching four hours of television exposes the watcher to 4 millirems. The human body itself produces 40 millirems of radioactivity, he said.

Last April, Exelon applied to the NRC to extend Limerick's operating license to 2024 and 2029 for units one and two respectively. Szafran said Peach Bottom's license extension has already been granted by the NRC.

Sheehan estimated it would take about one year for the NRC's central office in Rockville, Md. to review the Jan. 6 application and make a decision, "although it could take long longer as this is a bit unusual."

If it is found to be acceptable, the NRC will publish a notice in the Federal Register and anyone who wants to initiate a public hearing on the proposal will have 60 days to identify legitimate concerns.

The situation with the low-level radioactive waste is analogous to the situation with the highly radioactive spent fuel rods.

The federal government had pledged to built a facility for the spent fuel and, until recently, had focused its long-delayed and over-budgeted efforts on Yucca Mountain, Nevada, home state of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat.

Almost a year ago, shortly after taking office, the Obama administration announced it would cease studying Yucca Mountain, which had been found to be less geologically and hydrodynamically ideal than was first thought.

In 2007, Exelon broke ground on a storage facility for its spent fuel rods, the pool in which they had been kept since the plant opened being near to full. The older rod assemblies are rotated out of the pool and into a steel "dry cask," which is stored inside a concrete bunker. The newer, hotter fuel, is then placed in the pool inside the reactor building.

The spent fuel remains radioactive for hundreds of years.

On Friday, the U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the formation of a "Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future to develop a "safe, long-term solution to managing the Nation's used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste."

Two days earlier, President Barack Obama issued a call for more nuclear power plants in his State of the Union address. He made no mention of where the additional waste will be put.

To date, 55 years since the first atomic power plant was started up and 33 years since President Jimmy Carter banned the re-processing of nuclear fuel to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons, a final solution for what to do with nuclear waste has yet to present itself.