Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff plan to submit a proposed rulemaking about near-surface disposal of Greater Than Class C waste to the commission in November, officials told the public Wednesday.
The proposed rule, years in the making, combines a 2015 inquiry into a rules change for Greater-Than-Class-C (GTCC) waste with changes to low-level waste disposal governed under Title 10, Part 61 of the Code of Federal Regulations.
NRC staff in 2020 reasserted a conclusion that states can accept GTCC and that most of the U.S. inventory of such material — projected at 420,000 cubic feet or 12,000 cubic meters — would be safe at a facility like Waste Control Specialists’ disposal site in west Texas. A dissenting staff opinion held that only the federal government can dispose of GTCC.
GTCC waste includes activated metals from nuclear power reactors, sealed sources, waste from manufacturing of radioisotope products, and material from DOE’s West Valley Demonstration Project cleanup in New York state.
In a public webinar Wednesday, David Esh, a senior risk analyst at NRC, also invited the public to weigh in about whether waste from the fuel cycles of advanced reactor designs now in the early research and development phases should be considered in the combined GTCC and low-level waste rule.
The public will not formally get a chance to comment on the proposed rule until after the commission has approved it and the commission “works to their own schedule,” George Tartal, an official with NRC’s Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, said during the webinar.
In the meantime, the NRC has not yet proposed any local meetings near any of the four existing U.S. low-level waste disposal sites in South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Washington state, commission staff said on the webinar.
