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News & Observer Tuesday, May 6, 2003 Editorial Out of the Pool One of the sorest points among those who perceive safety risks at the Shearon Harris nuclear power plant in southwestern Wake County is the plant's role as a storehouse for highly radioactive spent fuel rods. In fact, Progress Energy Inc., the plant's owner, so far seems to have shipped and stored the rods -- after their use at Harris and two other plants -- without notable incident. Still, it would be a step in a comforting direction if the company did end rail shipment of the rods to Harris and, indeed, changed its method for storing the rods from water-filled pools to dry casks. Progress may make the change because it wants to continue generating power at Harris and at the two plants whose rods also now are stored there, Brunswick near Southport and Robinson in Hartsville, S.C. Besides, after 2005, the company would need to ask the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to relicense the rail containers that transport the rods to Harris. Spent rods give off lethal amounts of radioactivity for thousands of years. The company downplays chances of a serious accident involving the Harris waste pools -- but if a pool somehow drained and the stored material caught fire, the consequences would not be pleasant. Progress ships rods to Harris because the plant has plenty of pool space (it's the only commercial nuclear plant in the Southeast that receives fuel from other plants, and it could become the largest repository of spent fuel rods in the nation). The federal government has agreed to build a dump for such high-level waste, but the deadline for doing so is long passed and it could be a decade or more, if ever, before a planned site under a Nevada mountain is opened. Under the cask approach, rods that have been cooled in pools for five years are put in steel-lined concrete containers. There is less danger. Rods wouldn't be shipped by rail across North Carolina, which is done with care but still is a weak link in the nuclear security chain. Fewer rods in Harris' pools would lessen the chance of an accident, and the scope of an accident if one occurred. Cask storage buildings could be designed with terrorist threats in mind, a worry that didn't loom as large when pool buildings were designed. Harris is staying put. Set in the midst of the populous Triangle, it needs to be as safe as possible. Progress Energy's consideration of an alternate spent fuel storage method is timely and welcome. |
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