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Ohio still has chance to land spent-fuel storage operation
Feds hand out grants to study locations that fit bill. Ohio's Piketon area is being proposed as one.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Ohio is still in the running for the federal government's proposed spent nuclear fuel storage and reprocessing plant and burner reactor.
The U.S. Department of Energy said Wednesday Ohio's site is one of 11 nationwide that will get grants to study whether they are suitable.
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The sites are in eight states. They're being considered for two advanced nuclear facilities that are part of President Bush's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.
His plan calls for storing the highly radioactive spent fuel rods from across the country, and perhaps the world, on the site of the reprocessing plant.
The Ohio site is the Energy Department's Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a now-closed uranium enrichment plant near Piketon, about 100 miles southeast of Dayton.
Dennis Spurgeon, assistant energy secretary, said the energy department will distribute $16 million in site study grants. The grant amounts will be negotiated early next year with the applicants, who will have 90 days to do the study. The government will decide in 2008 whether to proceed.
The Piketon proposal was made by the Southern Ohio Nuclear Integration Cooperative (SONIC), formed by Cleveland entrepreneur Dan T. Moore and a Piketon development group.
SONIC's Greg Simonton said the study will give the company a chance to better understand if the new facilities would work on the Piketon site and, if not, what else might.
Two activist groups and residents speaking out at recent public meetings oppose placing the facilities at the plant, which is in the midst of a multi-billion cleanup of radioactive and chemical contamination. A Dayton Daily News series this month outlined how the government and its contractors polluted the environment and sickened workers over the plant's 47 years. It closed in 2001.
Opponents say the proposed facilities would make Piketon a national nuclear dump site and possible terrorist target.
"The site is totally unsuited to spent fuel storage," said Geoffrey Sea, a member of Southern Ohio Neighbors Group. "The danger, as we see it, is that the Department of Energy intends to put this site on hold while it is pursuing this fantasy, relieving it of cleanup responsibilities."
The DOE has said it's committed to the cleanup.
Barry Bennett, chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt R-Loveland, dismissed critics as "professional activists" and said her office has received hundreds of letters of support.
He said Schmidt is excited that a site in her congressional district received the grant and could get facilities that may create thousands of jobs.
The fuel reprocessing plant would remove plutonium and other radioactive contaminants from spent fuel so it could be reused in nuclear reactors.
Some of the contaminants would be disposed of but the plutonium would fuel an advanced burner reactor to create electricity and, the government hopes, create shorter-lived nuclear waste than existing reactors do. A chief goal is to reduce the amount of waste that must be buried in the government's long-delayed Yucca Mountain deep geologic repository.
