GAO: WEAK D&D FUND OVERSIGHT MAY LEAVE SOME REACTORS SHORT ON CLEANUP FUNDS

Weaknesses in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s decommissioning fund oversight may lead some nuclear reactors to be short on cleanup funds when they shut down, the Government Accountability Office concluded in a report released yesterday. The report was requested by Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass) in his former role as Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. GAO found that imprecise definitions in NRC’s decommissioning formula may be leading to unreliable estimates; in some instances, GAO found that the NRC formula captured as little as 57 percent of the costs reflected in reactors’ site-specific estimate. Similarly, “NRC did not have written procedures describing the steps that staff should take for conducting these reviews, which likely contributed to NRC staff not always documenting the results of the reviews clearly or consistently,” GAO wrote in the report. Markey said in a statement yesterday, “The NRC appears to be inaccurately estimating the costs of decommissioning the nation’s nuclear power plants and inadequately ensuring that owners are financially planning for the eventual shutdown of these plants. It will be the public who’ll pay the price if nuclear power plant owners come up short on the bill to safely close these plants.”