Sep 26 - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - Tom Henry The Blade, Toledo, Ohio

Spent reactor fuel from the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Ottawa County could be en route to tribal land in Utah within three years if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's recent authorization of a storage license stands up in court.

In a 3-1 vote, a majority of NRC commissioners ordered the agency's staff to prepare a license for Private Fuel Storage LLC to build and operate a storage facility on a reservation owned by the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians.

In so doing, the NRC's top brass rejected Utah's argument that the public stands an unreasonable risk of being exposed to radiation by up to 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel that could be stored in bunkers on the reservation for up to 40 years.

Though Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman vows to challenge the NRC's decision in a federal appeals court, Private Fuel Storage believes it has won a big battle in its quest to help utilities get spent fuel off their nuclear complexes.

The decision also opens the possibility of having other nuclear plants east of Toledo put their highly radioactive waste on the Ohio Turnpike sooner than anticipated.

Private Fuel Storage is an eight-utility consortium to which FirstEnergy Corp. belongs.

Although those eight utilities have funded the consortium since it was formed in the fall of 1996, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll be the first in line to send their waste to the West, said Sue Martin, a Private Fuel Storage spokesman.

The group will court other utilities as well.

"The next thing we have to do is market the facility. We have to round up enough customers to make the project viable," she said.

Richard Wilkins, a FirstEnergy spokesman, called it a contingency move for Davis-Besse and other nuclear plants the utility owns.

Davis-Besse, which was opened in 1977, is the nuclear plant under FirstEnergy's corporate umbrella that is most pressed for space. The utility's predecessor, Toledo Edison Co., spent $5 million in the mid-1990s to remove some of the decaying fuel assemblies in Davis-Besse's spent fuel pool. They were encapsulated outdoors in storage bunkers and put under 24-hour surveillance.

The Nuclear Energy Institute estimates 78 of the nation's 103 nuclear plants could fill their spent fuel pools by the end of the decade, forcing them to either move waste or shut down.

Detroit Edison Co.'s Fermi II nuclear plant in northern Monroe County is a decade younger than Davis-Besse and says it has enough room in its spent fuel pool to continue putting waste there until 2010.

On a national scale, the space crunch has evolved into something the government didn't want to see happen: Decentralized storage of the only material in civilian hands that's classified as high-level radioactive waste.

Questions about what to do with tons of decaying fuel from the nation's 103 commercial nuclear reactors have long been one of the greatest impediments for an industry that wants to expand. The government was supposed to start accepting the waste at a single repository by, 1998.

The U.S. Department of Energy for years has focused on Nevada's Yucca Mountain, a dry and isolated area between Las Vegas and California's Death Valley. As part of the government's Nevada Test Site once used to test nuclear bombs, Yucca Mountain remains under military control.

Utilities, frustrated over the research and development pace at Yucca Mountain, got restless.

A lease that the consortium privately negotiated with the Skull Valley Goshute Indian tribe in Utah calls for use of their domestic sovereign land at an undisclosed price. The license to be issued by the NRC will be valid for 20 years, with an option for a 20-year extension.

Private Fuel Storage has just about everything in place except for final approval on the proposed lease from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and authorization from the Bureau of Land Management for a 32-mile rail spur, Ms. Martin said.

The consortium would like to start construction within a year and have the facility operating in 2008, she said.

In addition to Utah politicians, it will face opposition from residents and environmental groups. Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen's energy program, called the consortium's effort an "unnecessary, irresponsible, and unethical proposal."

The Goshute reservation is 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, but only 11 miles from one of the nation's largest military test and bombing ranges where pilots at Hill Air Force Base are trained to fly F-16 fighter jets.

Opponents claim the possibility of jets crashing into the concrete-and-steel bunkers poses an unacceptable risk of radiation exposure to the public.

The site will be allowed to hold up to 4,000 such vaults, each holding an individual canister of spent reactor fuel.

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