Suit targets risks of nuclear waste
Coakley seeks debate on Pilgrim license renewal
State Attorney General Martha Coakley is asking a federal court to force nuclear energy regulators to consider risks to public safety caused by storing nuclear waste at the Pilgrim nuclear power plant before deciding whether to extend the facility's license for 20 years.
Coakley joined with officials from New York and Connecticut to file suit in a federal appeals court in New York. The lawsuit asks the court to force the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to open debate on license extensions for plants such as Pilgrim to the potential threat posed by terrorists and accidents to used nuclear fuel stored inside the plants.
"The risk of a spent-fuel pool catching on fire by accident or due to intentional sabotage is neither remote nor speculative," the lawsuit, filed May 6, states.
With that appeal still pending, Coakley and Assistant Attorney General Matthew Brock went to court to push the state's contention that on-site storage of nuclear waste presents a risk with potentially disastrous impact and should be part of license extension hearings. Current NRC rules exclude nuclear waste storage from licensing reviews on the basis that spent-fuel storage is part of the agency's ongoing oversight of all plants.
Used nuclear fuel has been stored at Pilgrim since the start of operations almost 40 years ago. Federal plans call for a permanent nationwide storage site, but despite attempts to locate a federal nuclear waste site underground at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, little progress has been made.
Nuclear power plants like Pilgrim rely on storage areas resembling swimming pools in which the used fuel rods are stored in cooling water. The NRC says this system has been effective and will continue to be safe for another 20 years, while critics argue that it was never designed to store spent nuclear fuel indefinitely.
Pointing out that spent-fuel pools were built "outside the protective containment shells that surround nuclear power reactors," the state's lawsuit contends that fuel rods have been packed more closely together over time, increasing the risk of fire. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, critics of the waste storage system have warned that terrorists are likely to regard the spent-fuel containers as a tempting target.
Duxbury-based Pilgrim Watch, which also raised the spent-fuel issue before the NRC's Pilgrim licensing panel, backs the state's lawsuit, said the group's president, Mary Lampert.
"We wholeheartedly applaud and fully support their efforts," she said. Duxbury's Town Meeting also voted "overwhelmingly" to make safer spent-fuel storage a condition of Pilgrim's operations, she said.
Coakley says the NRC has a responsibility to consider the impact of a terrorist attack because it has the ability to "mitigate" those consequences by storing spent fuel in a less potentially dangerous way.
Some nuclear specialists have proposed that used fuel rods be stored in hard-shelled casks and buried in the ground. The state's appeal to federal court relies in part on the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to examine the environmental impact of their decisions.
But NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said agency staff wrote an environmental impact study on Pilgrim that accorded with federal environmental law. That report concluded that continued storage of spent fuel can be accomplished "without undue environmental impacts," he said.
Sheehan said his agency regulates spent-fuel storage on an ongoing basis rather than "during the snapshot period" when a license extension is under review.
"Following the 9/11 attacks, we issued a series of orders requiring plant owners to take steps to improve plant security. The storage of spent nuclear fuel was dealt with via these orders," he said.
Sheehan also pointed to a recent ruling by a federal appeals court in Philadelphia that upheld his agency's position that spent-fuel storage should be addressed under ongoing regulation.
Robert Knox can be reached at rc.knox@gmail.com. 
