Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
10/3/2014
A collection of environmental groups this week threatened the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with litigation if it did not vacate its Continued of Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel rulemaking. The group, made up of 17 environmental activist groups, claims the NRC’s final rulemaking fails to properly address the repository issue needed to maintain Waste Confidence under the Atomic Energy Act. “NRC has long acknowledged that before licensing a reactor, the Atomic Energy Act requires it to make Waste Confidence findings that spent fuel can be safely disposed of in a geologic repository at some point in the future,” the group’s lead attorney Diane Curran said. “The NRC even said it would not license a reactor if it could not make such a finding. Yet, the NRC has now arbitrarily dropped those findings from its regulations, claiming they are not necessary. The absence of Waste Confidence findings is a significant safety issue that should concern the public because spent fuel poses a serious public health and environmental hazard from which the public and environment can only be protected long-term with a geologic repository. Yet there is no repository in sight today.” The group calls for a stop a of all reactor licensing decisions while the Commission resolves the issue.
When the NRC first issued a revised waste confidence rule in 2010, the Commission extended the length of time assumed to be safe for storage of spent fuel at a reactor site from 30 to 60 years. In 2012, though, a federal court found the NRC’s rule deficient and mandated an updated version, along with an environmental impact statement. In response, the NRC based its draft revised rule on a generic environmental impact statement that found the environmental impact of storing spent fuel on-site was small in most categories. This final rulemaking, though, removed language concerning a timeline for the availability of a repository after the Commission determined that was a policy decision outside the NRC’s regulation jurisdiction.
The NRC addressed the repository language issue in more detail in its public comment response appendix to the final rulemaking. “While the earlier Waste Confidence rulemakings included predictions of repository availability, the revised Rule and GEIS represent a change in the format from past Waste Confidence proceedings,” the response said. “An analysis of environmental impacts of spent fuel storage for long-term and potentially indefinite timeframes is now provided in the GEIS as the regulatory basis for the Rule, which was not the case in past Waste Confidence proceedings. Consequently, the relationship between repository availability and the consideration of environmental impacts from continued storage has changed.”
According to NRC spokesman David McIntyre, the NRC has received the contention and respond in due time. “The rule and generic environmental impact statement were developed in response to the Appeals Court ruling, and we are confident that we have addressed the court’s concerns,” McIntyre said. “Should the groups challenge the rule in court, the judges will decide if we succeeded.”
