Duke nuclear plant demolition timeline reduced
From 60 years to 7, contract to remove plant near Crystal River will cost $540M
Duke Energy is poised to begin demolition of its shuttered nuclear plant, with a timeline reduced from nearly six decades to seven years because of a drop in costs.
Duke’s 890-megawatt reactor near Crystal River at the Gulf ofMexico has been out of commission since 2009, when a construction accident crippled the containment building.
In 2015, facing a projected demolition cost of more than $1 billion, Duke was prepared to let the plant remain for 60 years before removing it.
But with the aging of nuclear power around the world and competitive advances in demolition technology, Duke is proceeding with a fixed contract of $540 million to remove the plant. That cost is to be covered by a trust fund of $717 million already paid for by the utility’s customers.
A newly formed company, Accelerated DecommissioningPartners, has begun engineering designs for demolition and is about to remove structures and infrastructure outside of the reactor building.
“We believe that decommissioning these sites as early as possible after their shutdown makes sense,” said ScottState, chief executive officer of Accelerated Decommissioning Partners and of its parent company, NorthStar. “They are obsolete generation facilities. Theypose certain hazards if left standing for a long, long time, and the quicker they can be removed the better.”
Accelerated Decommissioning Partners is a joint venture that includes NorthStar Group Services, which describes itself as the world’s largest demolition company, with services ranging from hurricane cleanup to asbestos removal, and is currently taking down the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station.
The other partner is Orano USA, a supplier of nuclear materials and services. In 2018, the company transferred the Crystal River plant’s used nuclear fuel from a storage pool to containment within dry casks that are nowstored in concrete bunkers at the plant site. There is no designated disposal facility in the U.S. for used fuel, and the dry casks could remain at Duke’s Crystal River site for years or decades.
Duke has transferred its operating license to the joint venture but will retain ownership of the plant parcel, which is part of a 5,000-acre complex also hosting coal and natural gas power plants 85 miles northwest of Orlando.
Serving35 counties as the state’s second-largestpower provider, Duke also is by far the largest electric utility in
Central Florida, with about 600,000 customers in Orange, Seminole, Lake and Osceola counties.
The Crystal River nuclear plant cost $410million, or about $2.7 billion in current dollars, with construction starting in 1968 and generation of electricity beginning in 1977. Orlando Utilities Commission and other smaller utilities owned small fractions of the plant.
In 2009, a major effort to extend the life of the the reactor damaged the reactorbuilding’s 3-foot-thick wall. After botched repair attempts, the plant was declared economically beyond repair.
The additional cost that customers had to absorb for the attempted upgrade and trying to fix the containment building was an estimated $1.7 billion, according to the Florida Office of
Public Counsel, a legislatively created agency that serves as an advocate for utility customers.
Other lost nuclear costs would arise from Duke’s move to build a $22 billion plant in Levy County. That initiative was announced in 2006 but abandoned within a decade, resulting in costs that customers had to absorb of more than $870 million.
Charles Rehwinkel of the Office of Public Counsel said Duke’s contract with Accelerated Decommissioning Partners should have included better protections in case of demolition or financial problems.
“We remained concerned that this process, which is fairly new, could have a problem down the road,” Rehwinkel said. “The problemswewould be concerned about would be cost
overruns and if they get part way through the process in an area where there is still contaminated metal components and there is a bankruptcy or some halt that leaves them in the position of Duke having to get somebody else to come in.”
Edward Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said there isn’t much track record yet for the kind of accelerated decommissioning and demolition being performed at Duke’s plant.
But his initial concern is that Duke’s fixed-price contract with the joint venture leaves little flexibility for dealing with unexpected challenges.
“They are going to have a strong incentive to minimize cost and that could potentially come at the cost of safety,” Lyman said.
Curtis Roberts, spokesman for Accelerated Decommissioning Partners said the joint venture brings global experience.
“We do this all over the world and we have lots of experience in France where there is a very large fleet of nuclear reactors,” Robert said.
Involving varying intensities of radioactivity, demolitionwill includesteamturbines, steam pipes and concrete foundations.
The most challenging work will involve the reactor vessel, a cylindrical assembly the size of a semitruck, with steel walls at least 5 inches thick.
Roberts said crews will cut the vessel into pieces while submerged underwater, which blocks radiation.
Cuts will be done with robots and other remotely controlled machines with a variety of band saws, diamondsaws and high pressure water jets with abrasive ingredients. Cutting will be according to specific sizes, shapes and weights.
While still underwater, pieces will be inserted into canisters, which, in turn, will be inserted into steel casks for shipment “more than likely by rail” to a disposal site in west Texas, Roberts said.
“All this is very specifically engineered,” he said. “Every single cut has been designed on a piece of paper.”