NRC Releases Draft Yucca Supplemental EIS
Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
8/28/2015
Assembling core management and technical teams and providing new information to the license application would take priority in any effort to relaunch the Yucca Mountain license review, the Bipartisan Policy Center said in a report this week. The BPC outlined a 14-step process to support the hypothetical resumption of the Yucca Mountain licensing review should pro-Yucca supporters successfully resurrect the shuttered project.
“Any effort to restart the Yucca Mountain project would logically focus first on resuming the license hearing process at the NRC,” the BPC said in its report. “The licensing process itself has been described as ‘long and arduous’ since it would involve a hearing before an NRC administrative law panel on the hundreds of contentions that have already been submitted on the license application and of the many new contentions that would likely arise in the future.”
The BPC prepared the report as part of its ongoing nuclear waste primer series analyzing the options for managing nuclear waste in the United States. Previous briefs looked at consolidated interim storage of nuclear fuel and how consent in the process from local stakeholders could look.
The 14 steps, as outlined by the BPC, are:
- Assemble core management and technical teams at DOE and NRC.
- Resurrect the NRC’s Licensing Support Network.
- Provide support for the state of Nevada, affected units of local government, and others with accepted contentions.
- Procure facilities to support licensing hearings.
- Assemble the contractor team needed to initiate hearings.
- Develop structures for addressing technical and regulatory issues in the licensing process.
- Develop required supplements to the environmental impact statement (EIS).
- Support activities external to the license application process that are integral to a construction authorization.
- Resume activities to confirm repository performance.
- Begin focused reviews of the technical literature and incorporate new information developed since the license application was filed.
- Assemble necessary contractor administrative support for license application activities.
- Develop outreach capabilities and interface with stakeholders.
- Assure adequate DOE and contractor structure is in place to support the quality assurance (QA) program.
- Assemble a team to assess and modify the QARD as needed to accommodate changes in the management structure since the license application was submitted.
The Obama administration halted the Yucca Mountain project in 2010 after deeming the site “unworkable.” In its place, DOE adopted a management strategy that called for consolidated storage of nuclear waste by 2021 and the construction of a consent-based repository by 2048.
DOE’s efforts to implement some of the major strategies outlined in its “Strategy for the Management and Disposal of Used Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Waste” are limited due to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act’s strict adherence to only allowing movement toward Yucca Mountain for the disposal of commercial high-level waste.
Yucca Groundwater Radiological Impacts “Small,” NRC Staff Says
The Yucca Mountain environmental safety case, meanwhile, gained a big win this month when Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff found that the proposed repository would have a “small” radiological impact on groundwater surrounding the site.
The staff’s draft analysis for the Yucca supplemental environmental impact statement, released on Aug. 13, bolsters the safety case for the shuttered project, which the NRC found to meet most regulatory standards for public health and safety earlier this year in its safety evaluation report. According to the draft EIS, the radiological impacts to groundwater resulted in a “small” category distinction, the lowest-impact EIS category, because exposure to radiological materials by the public and environment from the groundwater would result in only a small fraction of the annual background radiation dose.
“Based on conservative assumptions about the potential for health effects from exposure to low doses of radiation, the NRC staff expects that the estimated radiation dose would contribute only a negligible increase in the risk of cancer or severe hereditary effects in the potentially exposed population,” the draft EI supplement said. “Impacts to other resources at all of the affected environments beyond the regulatory compliance location from radiological and non-radiological material from the repository would also be SMALL.”
The NRC said in a release it would begin taking public comments on the draft on Aug. 21 upon publication of a notice in the Federal Register. The public will have opportunities to comment at meetings in September at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md. (Sept. 3), as well as in Las Vegas (Sept. 15) and Nye County, Nev. (Sept. 17), and via a conference call on Oct. 15, the NRC said. Following the public comment period, the staff will make any appropriate revisions to the supplement before issuing a final supplement in early 2016, the NRC said.
The NRC took over responsibility for the document after the Department of Energy originally said it would complete the EIS on groundwater issues early last year. DOE later decided against completing the report, choosing to give the NRC all the technical information needed to finish it instead. That, according to DOE, satisfies its legal responsibilities under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.
