Plymouth: Officials look at feds plans for spent nuclear fuel rods

When the federal government decided about two years ago to abandon the plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, President Obama established a Blue Ribbon Commission to determine other alternatives for nuclear waste disposal. Recently, the Commission published their recommendations.

This week, Plymouth Selectman Belinda Brewster told fellow boards members about some of them:

“It’s still to have the federal government build a site and take the spent fuel rods from the nuclear plants.”

But they propose that the government not be involved in managing the nuclear waste:

“They do want to establish an independent company. They compare it to the Tennessee Valley Authority—and independent corporation to manage the nuclear waste —and not have it be done through the Department of Energy.”

Brewster says the Commission does have some concrete plans—but…

“They state it’s going to be decades before any of this is accomplished and meanwhile, here in Plymouth we have forty years of spent fuel rods in a pool that was built for eight hundred and eighty and has over three thousand spent fuel rods. We want to do something about that issue today.”