Scott Northard
Private Fuel Storage

Scott Northard is a nuclear engineer with Xcel Energy (formerly Northern States Power), a Minnesota-based utility company that operates several nuclear power plants. For the past three years he has been the designated Project Director for the Private Fuel Storage temporary waste storage project intended for the reservation lands of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians in Tooele County, Utah.

The interview was conducted by program Producer Ken Verdoia at the Northern States Power Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant in Red Wing, Minnesota.

Ken Verdoia: I want to begin with trying to get a handle on Private Fuel Storage. Tell me about this entity.

Scott Northard: Well Private Fuel Storage is a group of eight utilities who have worked together to propose, license and develop an interim spent fuel storage facility located on the reservation of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indian tribe. In 1996 we signed an agreement with the tribe to lease a portion of their reservation, about 820 acres, that would be used for a temporary storage facility for spent nuclear fuel. Spent fuel is a material that we need to store on an interim basis until a permanent repository is opened by the federal government and would be used for receiving, for long term storage and disposal of spent fuel. Currently, there's work going on in Nevada to scientifically explore and characterize an area called Yucca Mountain. And in 1987, Congress designated that as a study area for a permanent geologic repository for commercial and governmental spent fuel in the United States.

Verdoia: As you and I sit on this day in February, we may in fact be just months away from a certification by the Department of Energy that scientifically Yucca Mountain may be the best permanent facility. If a permanent facility might be within grasp, why even consider the notion of a temporary facility?

Northard: Well, Xcel Energy, as well as all of the other utilities that generate power with nuclear power plants, signed an agreement with the Department of Energy back in 1983. In that agreement, during that contract, our customers agreed to pay one million for every kilowatt hour of electricity that we generate to the federal government into a fund called the Nuclear Waste Fund, to build a long term storage and disposal facility for spent fuel. Since 1983, however, the federal government has not lived up to their obligation and their promise to have a disposal facility ready to receive spent fuel by January 31, 1998. Because this deadline has come and passed, and because the Department of Energy does not anticipate having a repository or a disposal facility available until 2010 at the earliest, utilities like Xcel Energy are forced to consider other options for interim storage of spent nuclear fuel.

When our plants were originally built back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we only anticipated storing fuel for a few years on site and at that time the commercial power industry was involved in a reprocessing or recycling of spent fuel. And that's a process where you send the spent fuel off, transport it to a reprocessing plant. The uranium and plutonium are extracted from the spent fuel, which represents most of the material in the spent fuel, and that's reused in power plants. In the late 1970s commercial reprocessing , no longer continued in the United States, in fact, President Carter issued an executive order in 1978 that prohibited commercial recycling of spent fuel. Only the government could continue to do that after that time. So no commercial recycling plants continued operating in the United States and utilities were forced to store fuel for longer periods of time on site.

But because the plants were not originally designed to store spent fuel for decades on site, we didn't have the space available in the plants or the space surrounding our plants to build facilities such as these. In 1982, Congress recognized that the reprocessing option was shut off for commercial power plants, so they passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. In the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, they said that the federal government would take care of long term storage and disposal of spent fuel if utility customers would pay for it through a Nuclear Waste Fund fee. That was applied to their bills. And that fee is a one million per kilowatt hour fee. To date, utility customers and utilities in the United States have spent or have paid to the Nuclear Waste Fund about $16 billion dollars and roughly six billion of those dollars has been spent scientifically studying Yucca Mountain, drilling a five mile long tunnel through Yucca Mountain and doing extensive testing in the area. But it still looks like the federal government will not have a repository available for disposal of spent fuel until 2010 at the earliest.

Verdoia: And the situation has become so dire, by some estimates, that the utilities have decided to augment their argument for a storage site by taking the federal government to court and formerly Northern States Power, now Xcel Energy was party to that. What's the concern that's led the utilities to go to court?

Northard: Well, the reason that the utilities have gone to court to seek damages against the Department of Energy and to seek remedies with the Department of Energy for disposal of spent fuel is that the Department of Energy has not come to take the spent fuel as they said they would by 1998. Originally, under our contract, they were suppose to begin taking spent fuel away from our sites by January 31, 1998. That date has come and gone. The federal government will not give us a definitive date when they will guarantee the spent fuel will be removed, so we've been forced to seek redress through the courts. We currently have a lawsuit, along with several of the utilities, going through the U.S. Court of Claims. In fact, the Federal Court has already affirmed that the Department of Energy has a legal obligation to take the spent fuel. What's left is to determine exactly what they're going to have to do to meet that obligation.

Verdoia: As we've contacted other members of the consortium, they all have, in essence, differed to Xcel Energy, as if Xcel has a preeminent role in the Private Fuel Storage partnership. Is that a fair characterization?

Northard: Well, Northern States Power or now Xcel Energy is facing limitations on the amount of fuel that we can store on site. In order to keep our plant operating for a long period of time and provide safe and clean and reliable energy to our customers, we need additional storage for spent fuel. Other utilities certainly have a need as well but everybody's in a little different situation. We all have different sized sites. We all have different sized spent fuel pools that were originally designed in the plant to store spent fuel. Some of the plants started up later then our plants. Our plants were some of the earliest in the nuclear industry beginning operation here at Prairie Island in 1973 and 1974.

So we're facing the problem, perhaps, earlier then some other utilities. But there are other plants which have already permanently shutdown and would like to decommission and restore that site to its condition before the plant was there, but they can't do that because the spent fuel still exists on site. In Utah, a similar situation was faced at Brigham Young University, when a nuclear reactor was operated there for research purposes. That reactor has since been shutdown and decommissioned. They were able to that because the fuel was transported away from the site.

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