Illinois, Nov. 23: Twelve years ago, Commonwealth Edison found itself in a bind.
The Zion Station, its twin-unit nuclear reactor here, was no longer profitable. But the company could not afford to tear it down: the cost of dismantling the vast steel and concrete building, with multiple areas of radioactive contamination, would exceed $1 billion, double what it had cost to build the reactors in the 1970s. Nor could Commonwealth Edison walk away from the plant, because of the contamination.
The result was that Zion Station sat in limbo for more than a decade, and Commonwealth Edison, now part of Exelon, paid about $10 million a year to baby-sit the defunct reactor.
Now, though, the company is trying out a radical new approach to decommissioning the plant that promises to make the process faster, simpler and 25 per cent less expensive — instead of hiring a contractor, it has turned the job and the reactors over to a nuclear demolition company that owns a nuclear dump site. The cost will be covered by the $900 million that Exelon accumulated in a decommissioning fund.
If the approach is successful, it could have implications for ten other nuclear plants around the country that are waiting to be decommissioned, and for the 104 reactors that are still in operation but will eventually be torn down.
It will also save money for electricity customers, who often end up paying for the cleanup of nuclear plants through their utility bills.
The decommissioning operation at Zion, which began on September 1, will skip one of the slowest, dirtiest and most costly parts of tearing down a nuclear plant: separating radioactive materials, which must go to a licensed dump, from nonradioactive materials, which can go to an ordinary industrial landfill.
The new idea is not to bother sorting the two. Instead, anything that could include radioactive contamination will be treated as radioactive waste. Exelon could never have done this on its own, because the fee for disposing of radioactive waste was too high.
But the company has given the reactor to EnergySolutions, a conglomerate that includes companies that have long done nuclear cleanups, and which also owns a nuclear dump. “This is a first-of-a-kind arrangement,” said Adam H. Levin, director of spent fuel and decommissioning at Exelon. He added that others could do the job for less than Exelon and acknowledged, “utilities in general are not very good at tearing plants down.”
Government regulations require that nuclear reactor sites be thoroughly decontaminated, so that they can be released for re-use — often a lengthy process. The plan is to return Zion’s site, in the midst of parkland on the Lake Michigan shore north of Chicago, to re-use by 2020 — 12 years earlier than expected under Exelon’s original plan, which was to begin in 2013 and finish in 2032.
Any money left over from the $900 million in the plant’s decommissioning fund goes back to electricity customers in the Chicago area.