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This article was first published June 29, 2007.

Spent fuel from any nuclear plant would have to be temporarily stored at the plant even after the federal government decides on a permanent repository for the highly radioactive material.

“That’s just a given,” said Craig Nesbit with Exelon Nuclear. “You can’t take it out of the reactor and just ship it off. That’s just not possible.”

When the fuel becomes spent, he said, it is removed and put into pools of water to cool for five years. Once the cooling pools fill up, the oldest fuel is removed and put into storage canisters lined up on large concrete pads outside the reactor building awaiting transportation to the permanent disposal site.

Nesbit said there’s no reason for residents to be concerned about the material being stored on site.

“It doesn’t produce any radiation that they’re exposed to,” he said. “You can’t walk off with it. The canisters they’re in weigh 40,000 tons apiece. They’re steel-lined canisters inside a 21/2 -foot thick concrete wall. You could run a missile at them, and it wouldn’t have any impact on them.”

Kevin Kamps with the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, which bills itself as a reactor watchdog project, said there have been plenty of problems with the containers stored on site.

“The structural integrity of containers in use around the nation is already in question,” he said. “We’ve got an eight-page fact sheet of incidents that have happened with dry cask storage over the last 20 years.”

For instance, he said, a gas in a container at a plant in Virginia leaked through one of the cask walls. Kamps said although it was contained by a secondary wall, it still indicates there are problems.

“That’s concerning because these things are supposed to last a hundred years or more,” he said. “In just 20 years or less, they had internal leaks.”

He said there was an explosion involving a fully-loaded dry cask, followed three years later by another explosion. “They’re just taking major shortcuts on waste management, which is dangerous to do.”

Nesbit said fresh nuclear fuel is uranium and in its natural state isn’t concentrated enough to use in the plant.

Once the fresh fuel arrives at the plant, he said, the uranium has to be enriched by increasing the concentration from about 1 percent to 3 or 4 percent to create the chain reaction needed to use it as fuel.

The enriched uranium is fabricated into pellets a little smaller than a fingertip. The pellets are stacked in zirconium tubes 15 or 16 feet long and the tubes are bundled into assemblies.

The assemblies are put into the reactor, with each reactor holding about 500 of these assemblies.

“Until those fuel assemblies are bombarded by a radioactive source, they are essentially inert.” Nesbit said. But he added that once it goes into a reactor and is bombarded by fissionable material, it becomes radioactive and stays that way for thousands of years.