CHICAGO — Forty miles north of Chicago, along the shore of Lake Michigan, guntoting guards still warily prowl the grounds of the Zion Nuclear Power Station.
Inside, the control room remains staffed by engineers who check radiation levels throughout the plant. But their numbers are far fewer than before 1998, when the two reactors went permanently dark.
“A lot of people are surprised, because they think they’re going to find tumbleweeds and the place just falling apart,” plant manager Ron Schuster said.
Schuster stood in the shadow of the 10-story building, its outer wall made of reinforced concrete 3 feet thick, that houses one of the dormant reactors. Workers venture inside only about twice a month now, for inspections and maintenance.
A peregrine falcon swooped to the ledge of a nearby building where its family has nested for the past few years - a seemingly tranquil spot. But it’s about to get a lot more hectic for any wildlife or workers at the power station.
Exelon Nuclear faces a November deadline to transfer its U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to a Utah company called EnergySolutions, which will then begin the seven-year task of dismantling the plant piece by piece.
Although the timetable hasn’t been set, more than about 500,000 cubic feet of material will be moved, everything from concrete walls, pipes, wiring, machinery, even desks and chairs. Much of it is contaminated with low-level radiation. Enough to fill roughly 80 rail cars, it will be transported to EnergySolutions’ site 80 miles west of Salt Lake City.
It’s easier and cheaper than separating the contaminated material from the uncontaminated, officials said.
The plan to end forever the nuclear generation of electricity at Zion comes despite a nuclear renaissance of sorts. Some people - including former opponents of nuclear power - see it as cleaner and potentially cheaper than coal.
The regulatory commission is reviewing applications that have been filed since 2007 for 22 new reactors at 13 sites across the country. The flurry of interest follows a drought of nearly three decades since the last application was filed, officials said.
Exelon officials say the cost is too great to even consider firing up Zion’s reactors again.
“Exelon has looked at restarting Zion on several occasions,” said Adam Levin, director of spent fuel and decommissioning strategy at Exelon. “Each time we’ve looked at it, we’ve decided that it just wasn’t feasible.”
EnergySolutions, based in Salt Lake City, is one of the few companies in the nation licensed for the task of tearing down nuclear power plants.
The Zion plant - which sits on 257 acres sandwiched between the northern and southern stretches of Illinois Beach State Park - will be among its largest decommissioning projects, according to EnergySolutions spokesman Mark Walker.
The three years after the Zion plant’s dismantling will be spent restoring the site to a field of green.
Estimated cost: $1 billion. Customers of Commonwealth Edison, better known as ComEd, began paying into that fund in the late 1970s, a fee not removed from their bills until 2006.
The only remnant of Zion’s atomic past will be an array of concrete casks that look like stunted farm silos, storing about 2.2 million pounds of spent nuclear fuel and another 80,000 pounds of highly radioactive material from the two reactors.
In March, the Department of Energy withdrew its request to store highly radioactive waste deep within Yucca Mountain, Nev.
Like nuclear power plants across the country that had been casting envious eyes on the western desert, Zion will be home for the foreseeable future to the radioactive fuel it consumed generating electricity from 1973 to 1997.
The spent fuel will be moved from a pool of crystal-clear water to the “dry storage” casks just south of where the twin reactor buildings now stand, and remain there until the federal government comes up with an alternative to Yucca.
“How long the fuel would remain is uncertain,” said regulatory commission spokesman David McIntyre. “The [regulatory commission] believes the fuel can be stored safely for at least 100 years in pools and casks. However, the ultimate disposition of the fuel is a national policy decision that is up to Congress and the administration.”
When it powered up in 1973, Zion was the largest nuclear plant in the world, its reactors the first of a new generation designed to be bigger and safer.
But by the late 1990s, its owners struggled to keep the reactors online because of multiple structural and proceduralproblems reported by the commission. ComEd, now a sister company of Exelon Nuclear, cited economics when it finally decided to pull the plug.
Shutting the reactors down siphoned off hundreds of jobs, and Zion Mayor Lane Harrison said the property’s tax value dropped by hundreds of millions of dollars between 1999 and 2004.
Commission officials note that ComEd wasn’t the first or last utility unable to generate profit with nuclear power.
Zion had been licensed to operate through 2013, and might have been allowed to extend that permit another 20 years. But once ComEd decided it was a money-loser and removed nuclear fuel from the reactors, its license changed, allowing it only to store radioactive waste on-site, officials said.
No plant has ever “permanently” shut down and then asked to restart, according to the commission.
“There is no regulatory process,” said John Hickman, Zion project manager for the reactor decommissioning branch of the regulatory agency. “We’d have to start at ground zero and look at the equipment to make sure it’s suitable. It’s not like they mothballed the plant for future operation.”
Eight steam generators would have to be replaced, at a $1 billion cost that is about the same as dismantling the plant, according to Exelon. And that doesn’t include the price tag of getting the rest of the plant back to operating standards.
Information for this article report was contributed by Dan Hinkel of the Chicago Tribune.
Front Section, Pages 7 on 07/25/2010