CHALLENGES AT YUCCA MOUNTAIN
Ted Feigenbaum, President and General Manager of Bechtel SAIC Company LLC.

For a man charged with one of the most astonishing engineering tasks ever conceived, Ted Feigenbaum sounds pretty upbeat. Feigenbaum’s job is constructing a facility that will last at least 10,000 years and maybe far longer. He is looking at a horizon never before contemplated for a manmade effort, and, of course, none of us will be around to know how it is going to come out.

Ted Feigenbaum’s challenge is the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, or at least the first stages of it, meant to store nuclear waste safely from the environment for millennia. He is working in geological time.

He is doing this as the president and general manager of Bechtel SAIC Company, LLC (BSC), the management and operating contractor for the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) at the Yucca Mountain Project (YMP). But he seems undaunted; he has spent a career in nuclear energy, mainly in New England, and he brings a broad range of skills and experiences to the job.

Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982 to investigate means of dealing with nuclear waste, in particular to establish within the DOE the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management and to consider constructing a deep geologic repository. Five years later it amended the Act and directed the DOE to consider only one site, the one at Yucca Mountain, which is within the boundaries of the DOE’s Nevada Test Site. About 90 miles from Las Vegas, Yucca Mountain has been studied ever since for its capacity to safely shield nuclear waste from the environment.

Waste has been generated for 60 years by defense programs (including nuclear weapon production and the nuclear Navy) and electric utilities. Mainly this spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste has been stored on the sites where it was produced. Presently nuclear waste is temporarily stored at 122 sites in 39 states. The nation’s policy is, if practical, to deliver all of this, plus future nuclear waste, to Yucca Mountain for permanent storage. The waste would be placed in corridors 1,000 feet below the surface. When the facility is full, it will be sealed and monitored. Other nations using nuclear energy are developing their own storage sites and methods.

The Yucca Mountain Project is not yet licensed to become a storage facility. To obtain a license to construct the facility, DOE must apply for a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It will make this application sometime in the near future but, for reasons explained below, there is not at the moment a defined schedule for it to make the application.

Feigenbaum arrived at a transitional time. The DOE had recently changed its notion of how nuclear waste should be handled at Yucca Mountain. Previously the concept was to accept the material in whatever transportation canisters arrived, open them, place the material in more durable canisters and send them to their deep repository chambers. The new notion is to have the generators of the spent nuclear fuel place it into standard canisters that at Yucca Mountain would themselves be taken directly from the transporters to the repository chambers. Such containers are called TAD canisters—for transportation, aging and disposal.

Obvious Advantages of Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Storage

The Yucca Mountain Project would not have to open transportation canisters, remove material to place it in more durable canisters, then reweld the new canisters. This greatly reduces handling and the potential exposure to workers. Of course, the TAD canisters have to be of the highest possible quality, pass rigorous safety tests, and be made available to the generators of the nuclear waste.

This conceptual alteration obviously has changed how Yucca Mountain will receive and transport to the repository the material sent to it. Accordingly, the receiving facilities are being redesigned, and this effort is pushing back the licensing work. Says Feigenbaum, “We’ll still need some of the receiving facilities as originally designed because DOE may also want the flexibility to accept fuel in other forms. But after that the shipments will be in TAD canisters and we’ll need appropriate facilities to accommodate them.”

Speaking of the whole project, he adds, “The challenges are enormous. This job has never been done before. In other countries they are working on storage facilities, but none so ambitious as this.”

Feigenbaum is responsible for designing and building the surface and subsurface facilities, overseeing the scientific experiments in conjunction with the national laboratories, working the data into models and directing the whole toward the submission of the licensing documentation.

He has seen much of this—though not all—before. He spent 34 years in New England working in the nuclear energy field. Before joining Bechtel SAIC, he was the president and CEO of Maine Yankee Atomic Power, for which he decommissioned the 25-year-old, 900MW commercial nuclear plant. For that work, he created a dry cask storage facility for spent fuel. He also returned the site to greenfield for industrial redevelopment.

Before that job, Feigenbaum in the 1990s was executive vice president and chief nuclear officer at North Atlantic Energy Service Corporation in Seabrook, N. H. There he was responsible for the licensing and safe operation of the 1200MW pressurized reactor at Seabrook Station, the largest nuclear power generator in New England. He held positions of CEO and vice president of engineering, licensing and quality assurance at New Hampshire Yankee.

As a young engineer Feigenbaum worked at Ebasco Services and at Stone & Webster Engineering. His mechanical engineering degree is from City College of New York. He broadened this education by means of the Advanced Management Program of the Harvard Business School and the Senior Nuclear Executive Course of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations.

For the Yucca Mountain Project job, Feigenbaum has to draw on a host of skills, built up over years of experience. He is dealing with a state Congressional delegation that is mainly opposed to the YMP. But Feigenbaum has faced controversy before. When he was working to get Seabrook licensed, many in nearby Massachusetts were opposed to the licensing, and when the Maine Yankee plant was being decommissioned, some groups favored the dismantling and some did not.

In fact, it was at the Maine decommissioning that he became especially interested in the spent fuel storage problem. “Some communities resented the fact that utilities would store spent fuel at the site; they were anxious to have the fuel removed. So the Yucca Mountain concept intrigued me,” he says.

Accordingly, he made the transition with enthusiasm. And, of course, his days are filled with challenges. One is budgeting. He has to deal with significant budget swings and uncertainties. Although all nuclear utilities contribute to a waste fund based on kilowatts sold, DOE does not have direct access to the money; Congress decides how the fund is appropriated. “The project has to compete for it with other energy programs,” Feigenbaum laments. “Consequently, the project’s budget varies year to year. And we often operate on a continuing resolution. This is especially difficult for a long-term project such as ours. We’ve had to develop different budget scenarios, telling DOE that if funding is at a low level, this is what we can do and if it is at a high level then this is what more they can get.

“Another challenge cropped up last year when a judge said that the scenario of 10,000 years was inadequate because peak doses from radionuclides might occur in a time frame beyond 10,000 years. So DOE is now looking at potential doses up to one million years, and we are considering these in our calculations. Long time frames and potential events are dealt with through statistical probabilities. We cover the waterfront of possible occurrences,” he says.

Licensing Procedure for Nuclear Waste Storage

As a manager, Feigenbaum puts his emphasis on the quality of the work being done. By this he means “both the physical and the analytical work. My experience in licensing difficult and complex projects is that as a body of engineers, scientists and technicians, we can answer just about any technical question asked of us, but that success comes down to strong quality assurance. We spend a lot of time on this to make our quality oversight and validation process so strong it will stand up to the kinds of comments and issues bound to be raised during a three-to-four-year licensing procedure.”

He is confident the project can move ahead. “America needs more nuclear power for economic, environmental, safety, and security reasons and it needs Yucca Mountain as the final resting place for safely storing residual spent nuclear fuel,” he says.

He is pleased with the people Bechtel SAIC has assembled at Yucca Mountain. “They are very impressive, some of the best minds around,” he says. “We are working here with terrific scientists and persons out of the federal labs.” He’s also pleased with Bechtel National, which, he is quick to point out, has plenty of experience in tunnel engineering (it worked on the Chunnel) and in rail in tunnels (rails will be used to deliver spent fuel to the repository chambers). Bechtel, one of BSC’s parent companies, has a half-century of leadership in the nuclear industry. BSC’s other parent company, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), is the nation’s preeminent integrator of advanced science and technology. SAIC has some 19 years of continuous service on the Yucca Mountain Project.

Feigenbaum believes “the project’s licensing case is very robust. The Yucca Mountain location is very well chosen. All the scientists here believe this, that here you have the best natural barriers in the nation. This is a very important project to the country. It’s an energy issue--making sure that the country has a safe and reliable alternative to imported oil--an economic issue, because the nation’s economy depends on energy, and a national security issue, because it’s not a particularly good idea to leave spent fuel scattered at 122 locations across the United States.”

Ted Feigenbaum likes the variety of tasks and the variety of persons on the project. “It’s like being at a university,” he says. “There are eminent scientists and a great variety of disciplines, from nuclear physics to hydrology and geology. During the course of a day, I might be dealing with political issues, employee issues, warehousing, ventilation engineering, or attorneys with their legal points.

“All of the disciplines, sciences and interests have to be orchestrated. But it is a strong team and they do a fabulous job,” Feigenbaum concluded.