As safety calculations about nuclear power shift in the wake of Japan's nuclear disaster, plans to store 2.2 million pounds of spent fuel from a dismantled nuclear power plant in concrete and steel bunkers not far from Lake Michigan have some citizens from a small town near the Illinois-Wisconsin border worried.

Chicago-based Exelon Corp. shuttered its Zion nuclear power plant 14 years ago. That is when the plant's last red-hot fuel rod was lifted from the core's reactor and submerged in a pool of water. After giving the rods time to cool, the waste was supposed to be transported and entombed deep within Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

But the Department of Energy scrapped that plan last year, leaving nuclear reactors around the country to store the dangerous spent fuel on site.

In the wake of Japan's disaster, experts are saying that nuclear safety is generally designed for most-likely scenarios rather than worst-case scenarios, and local residents are wondering if the most unlikely events could happen and whether they would be protected.

David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that the buildings housing the pools are "very inviting targets for terrorists."

"No one has come up with a solution to safely store this waste for 10,000 years into the future," Lochbaum said.

The company managing the Zion site's waste plans to turn the 240-acre site into an uncontaminated field of grass by 2020. Unless the federal government comes up with an alternative storage plan, 10 to 15 acres of land on the site will host 61 concrete and steel casks, each weighing 125 tons, to store the spent fuel.

The casks are designed to withstand tornadoes and earthquakes and are next to impossible to steal, said Patrick Daly, general manager of EnergySolutions, which is dismantling Zion. Even if a cask cracked, hazardous levels of radiation would not get beyond the area around the cask, he said.

Still, local residents are not convinced.

Roger Whitmore, owner of a Zion automotive store and former president of the Zion Chamber of Commerce, said, "If we had a big earthquake or seiche," referring to a large wave from Lake Michigan, "what's [the waste] going to do, sweep into the lake?"

That is unlikely, according to Michael Chrzastowski, senior coastal geologist at the Illinois State Geological Survey. He is more worried about shore erosion. At an area about 2 miles north of the Zion plant, erosion washes away the shoreline by as much as 10 feet a year.

"Shore erosion needs to be continually monitored along the state park shore and near the power plant," he said (Wernau/Black, Chicago Tribune, March 19). -- AS