Agenda - 03-29-2007- - Laserfiche WebLink

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Over the next two and a half years, Orange County and its consultants confronted CP&L/Progress Energy and the NRC at every opportunity provided by the intervention process. The NRC was presented with volumes of evidence relating to the vulnerability of pool-stored spent fuel rods to fire hazards associated with terrorism, cooling water losses, too-dense storage and the like, in an attempt to convince or compel it to hold an evidentiary hearing in which technical issues and concerns could be examined in a public'forum. During that process, the County expended a significant level of funding and effort to learn that the NRC has a demonstrable bias in -favor of the nuclear power industry and that the intervention and evaluation processes are configured to produce outcomes that favor of the industry. The NRC granted CP&L/Progress Energy a permit to complete its activation of unused storage pools and to develop a more densely packed storage racking system. Orange County's intervention effort, though unsuccessful in a legal or regulatory, sense, has had some positive lasting effects. CP&L/Progress Energy stopped transporting waste from the Brunswick and Robinson nuclear power plants to Shearon Harris for storage. The intervention made case law that is being and has been used to contend with the NRC on similar issues in other parts of the country. The NRC has been forced to confront the serious and growing hazards of storing spent fuel rods in temporary. storage pools, hazards which it had managed to avoid recognizing or acknowledging for years. The Thompson report advanced the national science regarding spent fuel storage, leading to additional influential study in this area by Princeton, MIT, the National Academy of Science and others. Orange County's. attorney in the Shearon Harris intervention process, Diane Curran, continues to be active — and successful - in efforts ' to force the NRC and the nuclear power industry to address concerns about the safety. and security of spent fuel storage. Working for the Massachusetts Attorney General's office, she has filed Contentions related to fuel pool storage of spent fuel rods (raising the same concerns and issues first broached in Orange County's intervention) in the re-licensing process for the Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the Vermont Yankee plant located near Brattleboro, Vermont oust north of the Vermont-Massachusetts state line). Recently, representing the San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, Diane Curran was successful in a case heard by the 9th Circuit, US Court of Appeals. The Court overruled an NRC decision allowing Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) to construct r a dry cask fuel storage facility at its Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant without performing an environmental impact analysis addressing the potential impacts of a terrorist attack on or sabotage of waste fuel storage facilities. As of this date, PG&E continues to move forward with construction of the Diablo Canyon fuel storage facilities pending an appeal to the US Supreme Court. The NRC has indicated that it will file an amicus brief in support the PG&E appeal. On the negative side, the efforts of*the federal government to establish a permanent storage site for spent fuel (at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, or elsewhere) are now no closer to fruition than at the onset of the effort more than fifteen yea rs ago. "Temporary" spent fuel storage practices appear destined to become permanent fuel storage practices.