The Salt Lake Tribune

The U.S. Energy Department may have thrown a new complication last week into plans for proposed reactor-fuel storage in Utah's Skull Valley.

The department on Tuesday said it would ask its contractor to redesign the containers that would be used to ship waste and bury it permanently underground at Yucca Mountain, Nev., so that it does not need repackaging. That could be an issue for proponents of the Skull Valley site, a utility consortium called Private Fuel Storage LLC, which has just completed eight years of licensing reviews using an existing canister system.

PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin said Friday that the problem will wind up being the Energy Department's because nuclear companies have for two decades packed waste in so-called "dry storage" containers that are pre-approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

If the Energy Department, which has responsibility for permanent disposal of high-level nuclear waste, proceeds with its new containers, it would mean repacking all of the waste that's already in dry storage.

"They [Energy Department officials] have an obligation under the law to take the fuel for the utilities," she said, adding that PFS's plan is to use the two-part cask system developed by New Jersey-based Holtec International.

"That's what we are licensed for," she said.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has reviewed the Holtec containers to serve as a pre-approved option that allows utilities to store their waste at their reactor sites. Last month the commission licensed the PFS facility with those containers.

The Energy Department has struggled for more than 20 years to build Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository for high-level waste. Meanwhile, PFS' storage is contemplated as long-term parking of up to 40 years for reactor waste on its way to Yucca Mountain. Described as a stop-gap solution for reactors that were running out of storage space while waiting for the Energy Department to come up with permanent disposal, the PFS site has been analyzed for safety based on the Holtec containers.

The containers include an inner cask to hold the highly radioactive fuel and two types of outer containers, one for shipping, the other for above-ground storage.

Critics of the Energy Department's Yucca Mountain plan say the proposed changes are intended to smooth the way politically for the repository, cutting the costs and making the facility "cleaner."

In the law that designated Yucca Mountain as the national disposal site, the federal government promised to take the waste from the utilities in 1998.