By THOMAS CONTENT

After decades of national debate over what to do with spent nuclear fuel, and with no resolution in sight, the Kewaunee nuclear power plant in northeastern Wisconsin finally ran out of storage space inside the plant.

So over the past week, Kewaunee workers have begun storing radioactive waste in casks on the grounds of the reactor, a short distance from the shores of Lake Michigan.

After a practice run a few weeks ago, workers moved spent fuel into the first of the 25-ton, 16-foot-long casks and then transferred the cask into a concrete vault outside the building Aug. 22, said Mark Kanz, spokesman for the Kewaunee Power Station. A second cask was transferred Thursday.

An expert on nuclear waste from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's regional office in Chicago was on hand for the first procedure, said Viktoria Mitlyng, an agency spokeswoman. The process went smoothly, she said.

The casks were designed to be temporary storage for nuclear waste. This year, however, the Obama administration announced it was not going to move forward with plans to develop a permanent storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Instead, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said he would appoint a commission to investigate a variety of alternatives for long-term nuclear waste disposal. In the meantime, Chu told Congress this year, the NRC has said storing the spent fuel at reactor sites is safe.

"The NRC has said that it can be done safely. That buys us time to formulate a comprehensive plan in how we deal with the nuclear waste," he said.

The federal government is obligated by law to accept the used reactor fuel from 104 commercial power reactors, but as yet it has no place to put it. The spent fuel, growing at the rate of 2,000 tons a year, now is being held in pools and above-ground concrete containers at reactor sites.

The halt to the Yucca Mountain project could leave the federal government vulnerable to litigation from the nuclear power industry, said Derek Sands, associate editor of Platt's Inside Energy.

"The administration is gaining a reputation for being less than supportive of nuclear power," he said.

The Kewaunee plant is owned and operated by Dominion Resources Inc. of Richmond, Va. The reactor sells electricity to the plant's former owners, Wisconsin Public Service Corp. of Green Bay and Wisconsin Power & Light Co. of Madison.

Customer costs

Wisconsin electricity customers have paid more than $344 million over the years to the federal government to help pay for the Yucca Mountain project, according to Nuclear Energy Institute data.