Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
7/11/2014
The state of Nevada is gearing up to fight the results from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Yucca Mountain licensing review. Nevada’s Board of Examiners, which includes Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval and Secretary of State Ross Miller, approved this week a $1.4 million funding request from the attorney general’s office and the Agency for Nuclear Projects to combat the results of the licensing review. The request now goes to Legislature’s Interim Finance Committee, which does not meet until late August. According to Assistant Attorney General Marta Adams, the funds are needed to address the upcoming release of the Safety Evaluation Reports. “With the restart of the licensing, albeit at a lower than full adjudication level, we anticipate needing the funds to address the volumes of the Safety Evaluation Reports and then secondarily the supplemental EIS that we believe NRC will prepare,” Adams told RW Monitor this week. “The NRC can be expected to think that this is a positive or do-able project, and we believe that the science and the better arguments point the other direction. We want to be well-prepared to address whatever the NRC releases, and we think that will most likely be in the fall.”
Adams indicated that the state is operating under the assumption that the SERs would be released in the fall, and that the supplemental EIS would follow sometime in early winter. Nevada is basing those release dates off the monthly SER update reports sent to Congress from NRC Chair Allison Macfarlane, Adams said. The release of those documents would need intense dissection by technical and legal experts, which the funds would go towards covering the hourly expenses for work. According to Agency for Nuclear Projects Executive Director Bob Halstead, the state has been hard at work establishing new contentions to the site’s location, in case the adjudication process restarts. Nevada estimates that after the completion of the SERs and supplemental EIS, the NRC would have around $2 million that would obligate the Commission to begin the adjudication process. Halstead said the new contentions and additional funds would help Nevada fight the licensing in that process.
State Ready to Go to ‘Full Battle Mode’
Halstead said the state is ready to enter “full battle mode” to fight the licensing. “We mean business,” Halstead told RW Monitor this week. “We never stopped working on this, and we have really shifted to a higher gear since the Commission order came out in November. The way we summed it up [this week] for the Governor and Secretary of State is that we expect to be in full battle mode for at least six-to-none months. We are prepared to go 12 months. For us, as of July 1, we are in a new fiscal year—that’s why we are requesting supplemental funds now to go along with the carryover funds we already have,” he said.
A U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C Circuit decision last year compelled the NRC to restart the licensing review and use its existing Nuclear Waste Fund appropriations. The review had originally been canceled when the Department of Energy deemed the site “unworkable” back in 2010. The court’s decision resulted in the Commission issuing an order in November setting forth a pathway to re-start the Yucca Mountain licensing review, including the completion of the SERs and a request for a supplemental EIS from DOE on groundwater issues to satisfy requirements set forth in the National Environmental Policy Act. DOE had initially planned to move forward with the NRC’s request for the study, but in February, DOE argued that since it submitted a groundwater EIS in 2008, it did not have to update the EIS to fulfill its Nuclear Waste Policy Act legal obligations. The NRC plans to complete the EIS in DOE’s stead.
