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Raise the rates to cover the COSTS to stop pretending Nuclear Energy is CHEAP! 
It's NOT! 

Attorney general urges improved security at reactors

Maura Healey wrote to Congress on behalf of three bills that would improve safety at decommissioning reactors and at nuclear plants where radioactive spent fuel is being stored.

By Christine Legere
clegere@capecodonline.com

BOSTON — State Attorney General Maura Healey wrote this week to key members of Congress expressing her support for three bills that would improve security and safety at decommissioning reactors and at nuclear plants nationwide where highly radioactive spent fuel is being stored.

The bills initially were introduced to Congress by Sens. Edward Markey, D-Mass.; Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.; and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in 2014. The trio reintroduced them in April.

“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has long had an obligation to develop meaningful long-term solutions to the current on-site storage of nuclear waste in facilities across the country, yet it has failed to do so,” Healey said in her letter to ranking members of environmental and nuclear safety committees. “Its failure to act poses risks to public safety and the environment.”

A plan to store spent rods from all the nation’s reactors in a permanent geologic repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada fell through long ago and a new storage site has yet to be identified. That has left operators of the country’s 100 nuclear power plants with the responsibility of storing spent fuel on-site.

But while that situation continues, “We must ensure that proper security is in place at decommissioned plants where spent fuel is stored, that all spent fuel rods are transferred from wet pools to safer dry cask storage, and that we improve transparency and enhance opportunities for public participation,” Healey wrote.

Massachusetts’ only reactor is Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth, where more than 3,000 spent fuel rods are stored in a spent fuel pool. Another 200 rods recently were moved into dry casks because the pool had reached capacity.

Vermont Yankee, located in Vernon, Vermont, less than 10 miles from the Massachusetts border, permanently shut down in December. Nearly 3,000 spent rods remain in fuel pools on the site, and another 800 are stored in dry casks.

The Dry Cask Storage Act would require reactor operators to submit plans for moving spent fuel rods from wet pools into dry casks. The move would have to come within seven years of a plan's submission.

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The bill would provide funding to help licensees carry out the plans and would expand the emergency planning zones for noncompliant plants out to 50 miles.

The Safe and Secure Decommissioning Act would prohibit the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from issuing exemptions from its emergency response and security requirements for spent fuel stored at reactors that have permanently shut down until all spent fuel has been moved to dry casks.

The Nuclear Plant Decommissioning Act would ensure that states and communities have an active role in decommissioning plans.



http://www.capecodtimes.com/article/20150620/NEWS/150629959/101015/NEWSLETTER100