Alaska’s nuclear plant to be decommissioned

Petroleum News and Press Reports

U.S. Army officials have initiated the process of decommissioning of Alaska’s first and only nuclear power plant at Fort Greely in the Interior south of Fairbanks.

The SM-1A plant was built during the height of the Cold War, operated off and on for 10 years, and then shut down in 1972. Much of the facility was dismantled and disposed of, with the radioactive components of the reactor encased in concrete, essentially placing the facility into safe storage instead of formally decommissioning it. The enriched uranium fuel and waste were shipped out of the state.

The Corps now plans to remove most, possibly all, of what remains.

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported in mid-May that Fort Greely’s nuclear plant provided steam and electricity intermittently to the Army post near Delta Junction between 1962 and 1972 but was mothballed because it was more expensive to operate than a conventional diesel power plant.

It was one of eight experimental projects testing the use of small nuclear power plants at remote locations, the report said.

The Corps said it expects to take about 10 years to plan, contract out and clean up the site.

The decommissioning planning contract for the reactor was recently awarded, per the Corps’ Baltimore District website, although the contractor was not named.

“The project team is working with our contractor and will be working with the external stakeholders and interested parties as we proceed with our planning efforts. Additionally, the project team has started the contract acquisition process for the next phase of work, which would be the actual decommissioning implementation,” the website said.

One challenge the team faces is that the steam plant previously powered by the nuclear reactor is still in use, although it’s powered by a diesel-fired power plant operated by Doyon Utilities.

“As we go through the planning process and ultimately through implementation, safety of the workers is a No. 1 priority,” Chris Gardner, a spokesman for the Corps told the News-Miner in a telephone interview from Baltimore.

In an Alaska Public Radio report out of Fairbanks, Brian Hearty who manages the Corps’ Deactivated Nuclear Power Plant Program was interviewed.

Initially, Hearty said, the objective was to reduce significant fuel-transportation costs by having a nuclear reactor that could operate for long terms with just one nuclear core.

The Army hoped “the facility could provide power reliably at remote radar sites around the Arctic that would scan the skies for incoming missiles from the Soviet Union - which at that time, was America’s archrival.

“Because of the Cold War, the Air Force and Army were looking at the potential for a lot of the defense radar sites to be located up there,” Hearty said.

The program worked, but maybe not in the way Pentagon officials had hoped, he said. They learned the SM-1A could be built and operated in a cold and remote locale, but found its upfront costs were much higher than anticipated, and that it cost more to maintain than a diesel power plant.

“One of the big things that shut down the program overall was the creation of the ICBMs that go up over the defense early-warning systems,” Hearty said.

So the SM-1A, built at a cost of about $17 million, was shut down in 1972.

“All of the fuel in the reactor core was removed and shipped back to the Atomic Energy Commission for them to either reprocess of dispose of,” he said. “The highly activated control and absorber rods were also removed and shipped back” to AEC.

The power plant produced 1.8 megawatts of electricity and 20 megawatts of thermal energy, including steam, which was used to heat the military post.

Because that part of the facility was still needed, Army officials removed most of the nuclear-power system and hooked the heat and steam components to the diesel-fired boiler. But they left several parts of the nuclear system in place, including the highly radioactive reactor pressure vessel and reactor coolant pumps.

“Those were either kept in place or they were cut off and laid down in the tall vapor-containment building there … then they were grouted and concreted in place,” Hearty said.

That is what remains to be cleaned up, along with other remediation, in order for the SM-1A to be declared fully decommissioned, he told public radio.

The Corps wants to remove everything, but Hearty said it’s not yet known whether doing so is feasible. Meanwhile, monitoring for radioactivity around the facility shows it remains at acceptably low levels.

“It would be safe to say there’s no threat to human health in the environment,” Brenda Barber project manager for the decommissioning, told public radio.

Barber said the Corps awarded $4.6 million contract to a Virginia-based firm to develop a long-range plan for the project, but also did not name the firm. Among other things, the contractor will help Corps officials decide how much of the SM-1A will remain after it’s decommissioned.