Commissioner Annie Caputo on Thursday questioned whether it made sense for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to issue a blanket guidance for detecting buried low-level radioactive waste at power plants undergoing decommissioning.
NRC staff plan to finish the guidance by Sept. 30, a commission spokesperson said. Staff opened comments on the draft guidance in December. The document was published in October, months after the agency signed off on the final cleanup of one Midwest nuclear power plant and a month before it signed off on cleanup of another.
Both decommissionings involved exchanges between the cleanup companies and the NRC that can be avoided in the future with the right guidance, a commission staffer said at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md., during Thursday’s Strategic Programmatic Overview of the Decommissioning and Low-Level Waste and Nuclear Materials Users Business Lines.
Caputo appeared skeptical.
“If historically it was on a case-by-case basis and now you’re doing it across-the-board, how is that more efficient?” Capito asked Cynthia Barr, an NRC senior risk analyst, at Thursday’s meeting.
“Because before [decommissioning companies] didn’t know what to do and they would go back and forth with the NRC, the NRC would have a bunch of requests for additional information, they didn’t know what exposure scenarios to consider, then they’d have to go back and redo their models, derive cleanup levels all over again,” Barr said.
In December and January, the industry’s biggest trade group, the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute, commented on the proposed guidance, “Interim Staff Guidance on Subsurface Investigations, Radiological Survey and Dose Modeling of the Subsurface to Support License Termination.” Such guidances are usually folded into subsequent overhauls of NRC decommissioning regulations.
The draft guidance, Barr said, was informed by the cleanup of the LaCrosse Nuclear Power Plant near Genoa, Wis., which finished in February, and the Zion Nuclear Power Station near Zion, Ill., which wrapped in November.
Zion, especially, was challenging. There were, according to Barr, 128 ground surveys performed at the plant before commission staff were satisfied that ZionSolutions had brought subsurface contamination down to acceptable levels. It was a high tally that caught the NRC Chairman’s attention.
“The bulk of the decommissioning Zion had been done for quite some time and a lot of that confirmatory survey was what needed to be done in order to authorize site release,” Christopher Hanson, the NRC chairman, said. “Presumably there were surveys before that that were preliminary.”
