The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission expects more work on the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle as additional power plants shut down and spent fuel remains stored on-site at those facilities, a senior official said Tuesday.
Twenty atomic energy facilities are already in decommissioning status, and a number of others are scheduled for closure prior to the expiration of their operational license, noted Marc Dapas, NRC director of the Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards.
“We expect that there may be decisions made in the future by licensees, owners of various operating plants, to not continue to operate their facility and shut down,” he said in a keynote speech to the NRC Spent Fuel Management Division 2017 Regulatory Conference.
In the face of low natural gas prices and other economic challenges, some nuclear power providers have decided in recent years it is not financially feasible to keep their plants open. Entergy, for example, plans to shut down its remaining nuclear power operations by 2022.
While states such as New York and Illinois are offering credits to help sustain nuclear sites within their borders, “we would expect as we go forward that there would be economic business decisions made that may result in closure of additional plants, and that translates into more plants entering the decommissioning process,” Dapas said.
Dapas noted the commission’s ongoing decommissioning rulemaking, which is scheduled to be completed in 2019 with the aim of simplifying the process of decommissioning nuclear power plants.
Meanwhile, the agency also expects its workload to increase in reviewing applications for 40-year license extensions for independent spent fuel storage installations at nuclear power plants. The storage pads must remain open until the Department of Energy meets its congressional mandate to potential interim and ultimately permanent storage.
“That represents a significant workload for the staff, so we have been positioning ourselves to be able to accommodate that anticipated and increased workload,” Dapas said.
