Washington (Platts)--2Jan2013/506 pm EST/2206 GMT

Private Fuel Storage's December request that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission terminate its license for an away-from-reactor spent fuel storage facility in Utah that might never be built centered on economics, according to Robert Palmberg, chairman of the PFS board.

It was costing the utility consortium hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to maintain a license for a project that has remained dormant since NRC licensed the facility in 2006, he said in an interview Wednesday.

There were no "technical flaws" in PFS' plan to store up to 44,000 mt of spent fuel in casks on tribal land leased from the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes, but "there certainly were political hurdles," Palmberg said.

From the start, Utah's state and federal officials have opposed the dry storage facility, which would be located roughly 50 miles outside of Salt Lake City.

Palmberg said in a December 20 letter to NRC seeking the termination that the US Department of Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs has not approved the lease. He added that PFS does not have any contracts with facility customers and has not committed funding for the project.

Members of the PFS consortium had planned to use the facility to store spent fuel from their plants and then, perhaps, to open it to other utilities willing to buy storage space at the site.

But all PFS' utility members now have dry storage at their plants, Palmberg said.

PFS' members are American Electric Power, Entergy, FirstEnergy, Florida Power & Light, Genoa Fuel Tech, Southern California Edison, Southern Nuclear Co. and Xcel Energy.

--Elaine Hiruo, elaine_hiruo@platts.com --Edited by Keiron Greenhalgh, keiron_greenhalgh@platts.com