The Connecticut Siting Council has approved the plan by Millstone Power Station in Waterford to expand the size of its nuclear waste storage facility.
The council on Thursday gave Millstone’s owner, Dominion, permission to build a concrete pad big enough to accommodate 135 storage modules. The current site can accommodate only 48 modules.
Millstone did not ask nor receive permission to build the storage modules yet, but Thursday’s ruling paved the way for the facility on Long Island Sound to expand those facilities.
The onsite storage of spent uranium at Millstone and all other operating and decommissioned nuclear power plants – including Connecticut Yankee in Haddam – was designed to be temporary as the U.S. Department of Energy was supposed to start taking the waste to a permanent repository in 1998. That repository has never been built, leaving nuclear sites to store their waste in concrete modules at their facilities.
