The state of Nevada objected to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s recently announced plan to this fall prepare to resume its review of the Energy Department’s application to license the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository in Nye County, Nev.
The NRC on Aug. 8 said it would spend about $110,000 on “information-gathering activities” to gather input about resurrecting a database — the Licensing Support Network — containing roughly 4 million documents intended to support the adjudicatory hearing the regulator would be charged to conduct if DOE reactivates its Yucca license application.
That application is still officially in limbo following the Barack Obama administration’s 2010 decision to defund DOE’s licensing process — which the Donald Trump administration wants to resume in fiscal 2018. Congress has yet to reach agreement on the issue, with the House willing to fund the application and the Senate opposed.
The NRC’s planned information gathering would include a virtual meeting of the commission’s Licensing Support Network Advisory Review Panel (LSNARP). But the state of Nevada claims the commission has not given any of the potentially interested parties, including the LSNARP, enough time to prepare for any license-review activity.
“Any serious effort to give notice of your planned activities to all interested members of the public would include, as a minimum, Federal Register notice by NRC of those activities,” Robert Halstead, head of the state’s Agency for Nuclear Projects, wrote in an Aug. 25 letter to LSNARP Chairman Andrew Bates. The Nevada Independent first reported on the letter Saturday.
Halstead also derided the virtual meeting of the LSNARP as a “feeble initiative” that could not adequately collect and vet the volume of information all interested members of the public would, in the state’s opinion, provide about Yucca. The state called on the NRC to hold “numerous, face-to-face meetings” of the LSNARP, and to open them to the public.
Nevada, which has no nuclear power plants, vehemently opposes becoming home to other state’s radioactive waste and has vowed to fight the Yucca Mountain project with any resource it can muster.
