There are “significant opportunities” for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to apply industry recommendations to its current approach to the safe dry storage of spent nuclear fuel, a trade group representative said at an agency workshop this week.
“It’s our intent to use and consider risk principles in assessing safety margins for dry storage, for the uniform application of those margins in dry storage management,” said Mark Richter, a technical adviser for the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) at a virtual workshop co-hosted with NRC Tuesday afternoon.
During the session, the group discussed dry storage safety recommendations proposed in NEI’s 2019 white paper on spent fuel performance margins. In its white paper, the trade group suggested the commission use the same safety analysis practices for dry storage that it already uses with spent fuel pools. The agency should also develop better plans for managing possible dry cask ruptures that “maintain reasonable assurance” of public safety, the paper said.
NRC already implemented some of the trade group’s recommendations following the workshop’s last meeting last year, Richter said. In 2020 the agency reviewed its monitoring protocols for dry storage, which will be “useful in informing future licensing work,” he said.
“I think both NRC and industry would agree that collectively, we’re on a path that will result in some transformative improvements to dry storage licensing practices,” Richter said.
Currently, there’s no federally-licensed repository for about 80,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel nationwide. Spent fuel is instead kept in dry storage onsite at nuclear power plants or nearby at independent spent fuel storage installations, but only after it’s been allowed to cool for years in a spent fuel pool.
