The government is planning to send spent nuclear fuel from two of the nation’s nuclear power plants overseas for redisposal, in a bid to help solve the impending waste storage problem as spent fuel pools reach maximum capacity.
Economic officials said that state-owned Taiwan Power Co (Taipower), which manages the nation’s three operating nuclear plants, is to start inviting bidders early next year, with the aim of starting to send the fuel overseas in small batches.
The total volume of the radioactive waste being considered for the plan fills about 1,200 fuel clusters, they said, declining to say where the cargo might be shipped.
The move is expected to solve the problem of the fuel pool at the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Shihmen District (石門) approaching capacity. If the issue is not dealt with, it could force the facility to be shut down and decommissioned a few years earlier than scheduled.
The decommissioning of the Jinshan plant and New Taipei City’s other atomic facility, the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in Wanli District (萬里), is expected to begin in 2018 and be completed by 2023.
The government has been building a new dry storage facility to store spent fuel domestically, but the project has fallen behind schedule.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs suggested that if the facility is not ready by the expected deadline, the Jinshan and Guosheng plants could be forced to terminate operations because their spent fuel pools will be full by about March 2016.
The ministry and Taipower are therefore looking at the practices of other countries to promote the redisposal plan.
The updated Taiwan-US Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy Agreement, which took effect in June, permits the nation to send spent nuclear fuel overseas for redisposal.
The ministry said that the processing of the radioactive fuel would turn 97 percent of the fuel rods into reusable plutonimum and uranium, while the remaining 3 percent would be nuclear waste.
Under the scheme, the plutonium and uranium would not be shipped back to Taiwan, but resold by the redisposal facility. The remaining waste would then be solidified to reduce its radioactivity and after radioactive decay, it would shrink to one-fourth or one-fifth of its original size. It would then be sent back to Taiwan after being stored at the disposal plant for about 20 years.
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