Holtec Highlights

We regret to report that the country’s first NRC licensed consolidated interim storage facility planned for the Goshute reservation in Skull Valley, Utah, by Private Fuel Storage, LLC (PFS, LLC) has ceased due to opposition from the Department of Interior. PFS, LLC, an entrepreneurial group consisting of eight utilities in February 2006, secured a hard won approval from the NRC to build an autonomous consolidated interim storage facility comprised of up to 4,000 HI-STORM 100 systems, capable of storing a total of 40,000 tons of uranium. During the licensing process (1997-2006), the state of Utah litigated PFS’s application before the NRC and following approval in 2006, appealed NRC licensing decisions to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. (more…)

We mark the passing of year 2012 with a sense of satisfaction derived from numerous new accomplishments and milestones for our Company garnered by the diligence and perseverance of our associates here in the U.S. and overseas. We extend our year-end greetings to our clients, our personnel at all eight operation centers, and our suppliers who have helped make 2012 a memorable year of solid achievements for our Company. (more…)

Holtec International is pleased to announce the signing of a 10-year fleet-wide contract with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for providing the goods and services necessary to assist TVA’s dry cask storage of used nuclear fuel. The scope to be performed by Holtec through this long term partnership includes the establishment of a Watts Bar Nuclear Plant dry cask storage program as a Client Assisted Turnkey undertaking. It also includes the continuing supply of dry cask storage equipment and services to the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant (BFN) and the Sequoyah Nuclear Plant (SQN). (more…)

We are pleased to announce the completion of the development of an underground used fuel storage technology, termed HI-STORM CIS, to store large quantities of used nuclear fuel at a Consolidated Interim Storage (CIS) facility envisioned by the Blue Ribbon Commission. Begun in the wake of 9/11, Holtec’s underground storage technology has steadily matured over the past 10 years. The HI-STORM CIS facility (see schematic below) is the next generation underground storage design that will house used fuel packaged in any canister supplied by any cask vendor. The HI-STORM CIS features a monitored underground storage cavity with the used fuel’s decay heat passively rejected to the ambient air above and its radiation contained within the earth’s subterranean continuum. The radiation released to the environment from the HI-STORM CIS facility storing vast quantities of used fuel equates to a fraction of the background cosmic and solar radiation that pervades our planet, i.e., negligibly small.

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We are pleased to announce that Mr. Douglas Weaver has joined Holtec International as the Vice President of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. Mr. Weaver is a graduate of Princeton University where he received a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering and has over 25 years of nuclear power experience. Upon graduation, Mr. Weaver entered the United States Navy where he served as an instructor at the Nuclear Power Training Unit in Windsor, CT, and also as a division officer aboard the USS Louisville (SSN-724), where he qualified as Chief Engineer. After leaving active duty, Mr. Weaver joined the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission and has served in a variety of progressively more responsible positions in the field and at Headquarters. For the past three years, Mr. Weaver was Deputy Director of the Spent Fuel Storage and Transportation Division. Prior to that he served as the Deputy Chief of Staff for (former) USNRC Chairman Klein and directed the work planning and scheduling branch in the Office of New Reactors. Early in his NRC career, Mr. Weaver qualified as an inspector in Region I and then served for several years in the NRC’s Incident Response Center and as a Senior Emergency Response Coordinator. (more…)

Commencement of the movement of used fuel from the storage pool in Unit 3 to the storage pool in Unit 2 at Entergy’s Indian Point Energy Center (IPEC) this week marks the successful culmination of more than three years of work. Holtec International successfully labored at developing a safe set of equipment, processes, and procedures to enable the transfer of used fuel, fully submerged in water, from one fuel pool to another. Under the performance and team-oriented leadership of Joe DeFrancesco, Entergy’s Project Manager, the site will safely place used fuel from Unit 3 into dry storage without the need for extensive modifications to the Unit 3 fuel storage building. This “wet transfer” operation utilizes a Holtec designed Shielded Transfer Canister (STC) designed to hold up to 12 PWR assemblies, and an external shield cask (a HI-TRAC transfer cask). Wet transfer of fuel is admittedly a technically complex evolution because of the two-phase condition (water and steam) that may exist within the cask’s cavity. The benefits of wet transfer, however, are quite compelling. Most prominent is the fact that the fuel remains in its native aqueous environment throughout the transfer process. (more…)

We are pleased to report that the widely encountered problem of moving modern loaded casks across the nuclear plant’s “truck bay” (typically) designed for much lighter casks of 1970s vintage has been solved. The truck bay in a power plant is the main artery that links the plant to the outside world: It is the area through which all payloads used by the plant (component and machinery) must come and go. Unfortunately, truck bay slabs in a number of U.S. and overseas plants have local areas of structural deficiency that do not permit a modern full size cask, weighing as much as 200 tons, to be hauled across the bay in a conventional manner. This problem has forced some plants in the past to install support columns and girders to buttress the slab at a considerable expense. Others have resorted to temporary palliatives such as “load distribution systems” that must be assembled at each cask loading campaign and disassembled thereafter at considerable effort and cost. A cumbersome structure in the Truck Bay evidently is also an (undesirable) impediment to the movement of tools and equipment into and out of the plant. (more…)

We are pleased to announce Holtec International has signed a long-term contract with Union Electric Company (d/b/a Ameren Missouri) to deploy an Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation at the Callaway Energy Center. Under the Client Engaged Turnkey contract, Holtec will complete all facets of the engineering, site construction, security, fabrication, as well as pool-to-pad loading services to establish the dry spent fuel storage program at Callaway, located near Reform, Missouri. (more…)