Members of an advisory panel to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission today will have an opportunity to offer their opinion on the future of a retired database for nearly 3.7 million documents on the agency’s review of the Energy Department license application for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada.
The Licensing Support Network Advisory Review Panel (LSNARP) is halfway through a two-day meeting at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md., on options for restoring the network.
The LSN was shut down in 2011 when the Obama administration suspended the DOE license application, with the documents later placed in the LSN Library within the NRC’s full online documents system. With the Trump administration trying to revive Yucca Mountain, including new proposed funding for DOE and NRC licensing work, staff at the regulator in December issued a report outlining four options for reconstituting the Licensing Support Network.
They are: keeping the existing system in ADAMS and sharing additional documents by means such as mail or email; using the searchable ADAMS LSN Library; moving the library to the Cloud; and rebuilding the network.
“We will be polling the LSNARP membership at the end of our two-day meeting as to their opinion of the best option to reconstitute or replace the LSN should funding become available to continue the high-level waste proceeding,” Margie Janney, acting LSN administrator, said during Tuesday’s session. “If the adjudication were to proceed, we would need to evaluate the performance of any replacement or reconstitution of the LSN.”
Representatives of Nye County in Nevada, where Yucca Mountain is located, and the Nuclear Energy Institute both spoke in favor of using the existing searchable ADAMS LSN Library.
“For us to have to set up a new server and manage it ourselves is time and funding and money we would prefer not to have to do if we don’t have to,” Darrell Lacey, Nye County director of planning. “The searches we’ve done are actually easier than we used to have to do on the old LSN,” he added.
