Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
10/9/2015
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Ranking Member Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) this week renewed her attacks on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s exemptions to the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station’s emergency preparedness requirements. Boxer criticized the commission during a committee NRC oversight hearing for reducing the regulations at the shuttered plant in her state while spent nuclear fuel still remains on-site. “I am aware that the NRC is planning a rulemaking on decommissioning issues, but rubber-stamping exemptions the way the commission has is the wrong approach,” Boxer said in her opening statement. “I believe it is wrong to relax emergency planning requirements with thousands of tons of extremely radioactive spent fuel remaining at the site. The millions of people living in close proximity to the plant deserve better. The NRC owes it to the citizens of California and the nation to make safety the highest priority and I urge all the commissioners to refocus your effort to do just that.”
The NRC has approved SONGS’ request to exempt the decommissioning facility from some emergency preparedness requirements, reducing them to on-site, compared to the usual 10 mile radius established for an active reactor. Southern California Edison, the plant operator, argued in its request that a decommissioning facility does not pose as much as a threat as an operating one and therefore does not need the same regulations.
Boxer’s admonishment is not an unfamiliar chord for the California senator. The lawmaker has chastised the NRC during oversight hearings over the past two years, and joined other committee members earlier this year to introduce legislation that would require decommissioning sites to maintain emergency preparedness requirements until spent fuel is removed. The “Safe and Secure Decommissioning Act of 2015” would prohibit the NRC from issuing exemptions from its emergency response or security requirements for spent fuel stored at nuclear reactors that have permanently shut down until all of the spent nuclear fuel stored at the site has been moved into dry casks.
NRC Chairman Stephen Burns, though, said during Wednesday’s hearing that the exemption decision is based on the NRC staff’s safety analysis. “The current framework for a plant under decommissioning relies for better or worse on a construct that involves looking at the amendment to the license as well as the exemptions for rules that apply during operations, when there is fuel in the reactor,” Burns said. “The judgment with respect to emergency planning and the exemptions from certain emergency planning requirements were based on the staff’s analysis that the risk with respect to a spent fuel pool are not such that require full emergency planning. That is the basis for [the NRC’s decision].”
The NRC earlier this year initiated a rulemaking to address the decommissioning process. Currently, the NRC does not have regulations that reflect the decreased security and safety threat posed by a reactor undergoing decommissioning. Instead, a series of license amendments is needed to exempt those plants, a step that can prove costly and timely for both utilities and the NRC.
According to the commission’s staff requirements memoranda, the staff should in its rulemaking focus on a wide variety of issues that affect decommissioning plants, including the appropriate amount of NRC involvement in the post-shutdown decommissioning activities report, as well as the role of state and local government in the process. Burns indicated the question of emergency preparedness will be included in the rule update.
