GENOA, Wis. — Workers at Dairyland Power Cooperative’s Genoa facility are getting ready to start dismantling the closed nuclear reactor on site.

The La Crosse Area Boiling Water Reactor opened in 1969 and shut down in 1987. Since then, Dairyland has been working on plans to decommission the plant, which involves taking it apart and safely disposing of its radioactive parts.
The biggest part is the reactor pressure vessel, a large steel container where nuclear rods boiled water to create steam for the 50 megawatt generator.

“It’s a huge project because it’s such a large item,” said plant manager Roger Christians.

The vessel is considered to be low-level nuclear waste, and it will be buried in a nuclear waste facility in South Carolina.

Already, workers inside the plant have filled the vessel with concrete grout, increasing its weight to about 200 tons, Christians said.

The next step, which is now visible from the outside, is to cut a hole in the reactor building wall. Workers are removing the outer skin of insulation from part of the reactor building, and will soon start cutting a hole large enough to remove the vessel through.

The walls of the building are just over 10 inches thick — nine inches of concrete and 1.16 inches of metal. Workers will first drill through the walls, then use a diamond-studded wire saw to cut out sections.

Once the hole is cut, probably in November, workers will install rolling doors that can be closed. In March, they’ll erect a crane strong enough to lift the 200-ton vessel 20 feet in the air and slide it outside the building.

Outside, the vessel will be lowered into a steel container, which also will be filled with concrete grout, Christians said, and sealed shut. It will then weigh about 360 tons.

“There’s nothing to leak,” Christians said. “This is a low-level waste shipment, just a bigger one.”

The vessel will be laid on two special railroad cars with 20 axles, and shipped south from Genoa to South Carolina in mid-May. The exact route is not being disclosed, Christians said.

Gail Vaughn, an anti-nuclear activist who lives in Vernon County near Genoa, has mixed feelings about the decommissioning.

Vaughn said she’d feel better if Dairyland didn’t ship out the reactor vessel and other parts. “They’re going to have to write off parts of South Carolina as a dead zone” because of nuclear waste disposal there, she said.

However, Vaughn believes it was more important to keep the spent fuel rods from being shipped to Utah.

Dairyland is part owner of Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of utilities that wanted to temporarily store nuclear waste on the Goshute Indian Reservation in Utah. Recent federal government rulings have all but killed those plans.

Christians said Dairyland’s plan now is to store the spent fuel rods at the Genoa plant in dry casks “until the government lives up to its obligation to come and get it.”

The government’s Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada still isn’t done, and if it is approved it wouldn’t be able to accept waste until at least 2017.

Christians said a consultant is evaluating the best spot on the Genoa site for storing the casks. Those same casks could be used for shipping if Yucca Mountain opens.

Vaughn described the situation at Genoa as “the best a person could hope for.”

Eventually, the entire nuclear reactor facility at Genoa will be torn down, Christians said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has estimated the cost of decommissioning the plant at $79.5 million.

Reid Magney can be reached at (608) 791-8211 or rmagney@lacrossetribune.com.

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