HARTSVILLE, S.C. - This small town is a long way from the Nevada desert.
But delays in the opening of a national nuclear waste repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain could affect Hartsville, home to 7,800 residents, Coker College, the corporate headquarters of global packaging company Sonoco Products Co. and Progress Energy Inc.'s H.B. Robinson nuclear power plant.
The Robinson plant could soon start keeping its highly radioactive waste instead of shipping it away. While that might prompt concern in other places, it doesn't appear to generate much fuss among the citizens of Hartsville, Mayor Bill Gaskins says.
"We have a very good working relationship," Gaskins says of Progress Energy as he leans back in a black swivel chair at his storefront real estate and small loan business on N Fifth Street. "They just do a good job of maintaining their facilities, and they have an excellent safety record."
Under the latest version of a much-revised timetable, the nation's commercial nuclear power plants aren't scheduled to start shipping high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain until at least 2010. Instead, they store spent nuclear fuel - which is many times more lethal than low-level waste, such as irradiated reactor pipes and filters - on the same grounds as their generating units.
The lone exception has been Progress Energy.
Progress does use on-site storage at its Crystal River nuclear plant in the Tampa Bay area, which the utility inherited when it acquired Florida Power Corp. of St. Petersburg. But for the past 14 years, it has been loading sealed containers of spent nuclear fuel from two of its nuclear plants in the Carolinas on rail cars. The fuel is then transported from the Robinson plant in Hartsville and from the company's Brunswick nuclear plant in Southport, N.C., which are short on storage space, to the company's newer Shearon Harris nuclear plant near Raleigh for long-term storage.
Now in a surprising about-face, Progress is considering an end to its railcar shipments of spent fuel, at least until Yucca Mountain opens. The move is attracting attention because Progress is a major player in the nuclear power industry, and its corporate leaders are strong advocates of the controversial energy source. Chairman and chief executive Bill Cavanaugh, president and chief operating officer Robert McGehee and Progress Florida president Bill Habermeyer are all former officers in the Navy's nuclear submarine program.
Progress is considering installing above-ground "dry-cask" storage facilities at the Robinson and Brunswick nuclear plants, and the move is being applauded by environmentalists who had long pilloried the company for its storage practices. Some industry experts think dry storage is safer and more secure than the crowded cooling pools, a point the company disputes. Robinson and Brunswick currently use pools for "cooling off" new waste awaiting shipment and for the permanent storage of older waste.
Progress has received proposals from dry-cask storagemakers and expects to reach a decision on the matter by the end of summer, according to senior vice president and chief nuclear officer Scotty Hinant. If Progress decides to go with on-site dry storage, it would start phasing out nuclear shipments from Robinson by the end of the year and from Brunswick by the end of 2005, Hinant says.
Such changes appear to run counter to the future that the nuclear industry is gearing up for, in which spent nuclear fuel will be routinely transported from across the country to Yucca Mountain. But Progress' moves come amid continuing worries about the safety of shipping high-level nuclear waste, concerns that have mounted since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq.
That's also translated into increasing political pressure in Progress' home state of North Carolina. Officials in Chatham, Durham and Orange counties and the municipalities of Carrboro and Chapel Hill, all of which are near the Harris nuclear plant, have called on the company to stop importing waste to their area, according to Jim Warren, executive director of N.C. Warn, a Durham environmental group.
"They had planned to ship that stuff for decades and they gradually realized that the public is very concerned about the shipments and the growing stockpile at Harris," Warren said. "It was going to continue to be a major (public relations) problem."
U.S. Rep. David Price, a Democrat who represents Progress' home turf in the Research Triangle area, alerted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in March about a new study highlighting the security advantages of above-ground nuclear waste storage over spent fuel pools. He wrote, "Many constituents in my district are particularly concerned with the vulnerability of nuclear plants and spent fuel pools in particular."
But Hinant, the Progress executive, says political pressure had nothing to do with Progress' decision to consider different options for its nuclear waste. Rather, he insists it has more to do with the need to prepare for the 2005 relicensing of the rail containers the utility uses to transport spent fuel, which isn't a sure thing and requires that the company consider other options.
Besides, Hinant says, the Harris plant, which didn't begin operating until 1989, is one of the newest nuclear plants in the country. As a result, it would be one of the last permitted to ship waste to Yucca Mountain, which will receive waste from nuclear plants by order of the relative age and available storage facilities of each plant. So Hinant says it makes more sense for Progress to preserve what storage is left at Harris for that plant's own needs.
Finally, there's the continuing uncertainty over when Yucca Mountain will open. The project is years behind schedule. The facility was originally supposed to open in 1998. That has created waste-storage headaches for utilities that operate nuclear power plants. The utilities have collected and passed on to Department of Energy more than $20-billion in fees from ratepayers to defray the costs of an eventual centralized waste site.
Nevada officials continue to fight in the courts to block the Yucca project from moving forward. In testimony before a House subcommittee in May, an official from the General Accounting Office expressed concerns that the energy department's efforts to correct nagging problems in Yucca Mountain's quality-assurance program "have been less than favorable" and could delay its application for an NRC license to build the repository.
Despite such concerns, Hinant argues that extensive studies at Yucca Mountain have demonstrated the safety and security of the site.
"Politics is the reason why Yucca Mountain isn't open today," he says. "It's not technical issues. The technical issues have been looked at, have been addressed, have been studied. It's one of the most studied sites in the world."
None of this has raised much of a stir in Hartsville, where there's a high level of trust in Progress, formerly Carolina Power & Light. The Robinson plant is one of Hartsville's largest employers. Former CP&L employees serve as the town's chief building inspector and as surrounding Darlington County's chief deputy sheriff, while Sonoco Products chairman Charles Coker, whose grandfather founded Coker College, sits on Progress' board.
Still, not everyone shares in the enthusiasm for Progress Energy or its nuclear plant.
"We've got too much (nuclear waste) in South Carolina," says Steve Ford, a gardener at Kalmia Gardens of Coker College. "We should take our fair share but we've got more than our share."
Billy Pierce, an electrical engineer with a local polyester fiber company, says his biggest concern is that, "nationally, we're not doing anything with nuclear waste. We keep putting it off and yet people want nuclear power."
But local officials expect that community concerns about potential changes at the Robinson plant will remain minimal.
"The company has ingratiated itself and become a part of the community," says Hartsville city manager Jim Pennington, a former city manager for the South Florida towns of Lauderhill and Delray Beach. "It's been this feeling of comfort."
-Louis Hau can be reached at hau@sptimes.com or 813 226-3404
