Energy company begins storage of spent nuclear fuel

Dairyland Power Cooperative is in the process of moving its spent nuclear fuel into containers that the company considers safe. It completed the first of five transfers Thursday night in Genoa.

The fuel is moving into dry cask storage. It will remain at the Genoa Power Plant, which is now a coal plant, along the Mississippi River. The casks are built with stainless steel and concrete. Dairyland officials say it shields people from radiation.

Dairyland Power closed the nuclear plant, the La Crosse Boiling Water Reactor, in 1987. Since then, the spent fuel has remained in the reactor’s fuel pool.

Dairyland spokeswoman Katie Thomson says the fuel will be stored in Genoa until the federal government builds a facility to store it. “This was never a long-term plan, to have the fuel stay at the facility. So that’s how this came about. The federal government was supposed to take the fuel as of 1998, and it has failed to do so. So, utilities have looked in other directions and the dry cask storage is part of that.”

Putting the spent fuel in dry casks is part of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s decommissioning process, which it says will reduce radioactivity at former nuclear power plants.

Thomson says it cost Dairyland Power $6 million per year to keep the spent fuel, and she expects that cost to be cut in half now that it’s in the dry casks. Fully decommissioning the Genoa site will take another seven years and cost an additional $70 million.

Thomson says the dry cask storage will be monitored around-the-clock. She says the transfers should be complete by the end of summer.