Holtec International has submitted at least the majority of its responses to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s request for supplemental information regarding the company’s application to build a consolidated interim storage facility for used nuclear reactor fuel.
The information, spread across 11 attachments and hundreds of pages, was delivered in October and posted this week to the NRC’s online documents database.
“As stated in our previous letter … this submittal contains responses to all RSIs and observations, except for three RSIs that will be submitted at a later date,” Holtec Licensing Manager Kimberly Manzione wrote in an Oct. 6 letter to Jose Cuadrado, project manager for the NRC’s Spent Fuel Management Division.
It was not immediately clear by deadline Wednesday whether the NRC had received the remaining documents.
The Camden, N.J., company in March submitted a license application for a facility in southeastern New Mexico that could hold up to 120,000 metric tons of spent commercial reactor fuel. That would be more than sufficient to store the over 75,000 metric tons of waste now sitting at reactor plants until a permanent repository is built.
The NRC in July issued two separate requests for supplemental information based on its review of the application: one covering the application’s safety evaluation and environmental reports and another its physical security, safeguards contingency, and security training plans. All requests for supplemental information must be resolved before NRC staff can complete the acceptance review of the license application and move into the years-long technical review.
Among the documentation provided by Holtec in its October response: additional detail regarding emplacement of waste canisters into dry storage at the planned HI-STORE consolidated interim storage facility; various maps of the area in which the facility would be built; and resubmission of the license application under “oath or affirmation,” a mandatory step management failed to take previously.
