Orange County NC Website
suggested asking the Managers to get together and working out a mutually satisfactorily <br />payment plan. <br />Commissioner Carey encouraged afive-year plan. Mayor Foy encouraged aten-year <br />plan. <br />Chair Jacobs said that the only caution is that they need to see what the Solid Waste <br />Enterprise Fund has in it. <br />Commissioner Foushee suggested bringing back options of five, eight, and ten years. <br />2. Shearon Harris - History. Expansion, and Next Steps <br />County Engineer Paul Thames gave a history of the process that began in 1999. In late <br />1998, the County Commissioners learned that CP&L was going to expand the use of its storage <br />pools at Shearon Harris by putting in constructed pools that were not operational and putting in <br />anew racking system for spent fuel rods. At the same time, CP&L was shipping its fuel rods <br />from South Carolina and Brunswick, North Carolina to be stored at Shearon Harris. The plan <br />was such that by the time the fuel pools were filled, there would be mare nuclear waste storage <br />at Shearon Harris than anyplace in the United States other than the proposed Yucca Mountain <br />storage site in Nevada. <br />The County Commissioners hired an expert, Dr. Gordon Thompson, to evaluate the <br />potential risks with this storage scenario. The report was frightening and the Commissioners <br />learned quickly that there is not a good way to have a dialog with the nuclear power industry ar <br />with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission except through a process called intervention, which is <br />a civil suit regulatory process. The County went through a 30-month process to try and sit down <br />in a trial atmosphere and they never got very far and there was never open testimony from the <br />County's experts and the other experts. Fortunately, CP&L decided that they would not keep <br />shipping nuclear waste from outside this area to Shearon Harris for storage and that they might <br />try and have storage on-site at Brunswick and Hartford. The BOCC has not heard anything in <br />the past couple of years. <br />This past spring, during the North Carolina Utilities Commission's integrative resource <br />planning process, a lot of groups tried to convince the commission that money spent in new <br />plants could be more efficiently spent in measures to improve conservation and energy <br />efficiency. There was no success with this. <br />The attorney that Orange County hired is still working on similar issues in other parts of <br />the country. Paul Thames said that the NRC's position seems to be the need to do <br />environmental assessments on fuel storage is confined to the geographic area of the 9th District <br />Court of Appeals. <br />As of yesterday, NCWARN, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Nuclear Information <br />Resource Services, North Carolina Fair Shares, and a student organization filed an emergency <br />petition far the NRC to enforce the existing and federal fire regulations that apply to Shearon <br />Harris. Shearon Harris has been in violation of the federal fire regulations since the beginning. <br />He said that the industry and the NRC have been fiddling around with this for a long time and <br />they do not seem to be any closer to a resolution. Right now, Shearon Harris plans to come into <br />compliance sometime around 2013-2014 unless they get another extension. <br />Shearon Harris is getting ready to apply fora 20-year extension on its operating license, <br />which would extend it from its current term of 2026 to 2046. The process to extend the license <br />is probably a 30-month process that would start sometime next spring. <br />Chair Jacobs said that after September 11, 2001 the County tried to get the NRC to <br />consider a possible terrorist attack on Shearon Harris and that it could not be considered. <br />Secondly, the County spent a tremendous amount of money in trying to contest this. Thirdly, <br />Commissioner Brown and he were empowered by the Board of County Commissioners to try <br />and negotiate an agreement with CP&L that would allow a public forum in which both sets of <br />experts would appear together and discuss this and CP&L would never agree to this. <br />