The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will consider changing the way it runs the required public hearings triggered by construction of new nuclear facilities.
In a memo dated Wednesday and shared by the NRC with media, commission Chair Christopher Hanson ordered the agency’s Office of the General Counsel, within 60 days, “to identify efficiencies in these mandatory hearings that will enable the commission to fulfill its statutory obligations while it promotes the responsible stewardship of time and resources.”
What the NRC will not consider is eliminating mandatory hearings, something favored by the industry’s largest trade group, the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute.
Introduced in 1957, “[t]he mandatory hearing has outlived its useful purpose and adds 4-7 months and millions of dollars to the licensing process,” Maria Korsnick, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute, said in July during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce energy, climate and grid security subcommittee.
“While the NRC is bound by statute to conduct mandatory hearings for certain applications, Congress did not provide direction as to how those hearings are conducted,” Hanson wrote in the memo. “Flexibility in the statute allows the agency to adjust its processes to meet emerging needs.”
In a virtual press conference with media Wednesday afternoon, Hanson said that one motivating factor behind his order to the legal department was the expected influx of applications for advanced reactors.
What finally moved him to send the memo, however, was an Oct. 19 mandatory hearing for Kairos Power, which is building a new test reactor in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
The Kairos reactor will not generate power, but it will be a pilot for a design that might. NRC gave Kairos a construction permit for the reactor in December, about three months after the hearing. The hearing happened about two months after the commission finished its environmental review of the proposed site of the reactor.
“I was really working off of my experience of doing the Kairos mandatory hearing,” Hanson said Wednesday from NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md. “This has been a really good thing, but let’s think about how we might be able to do this differently. That’s really what kind of prompted my action.”
Asked how he believed the hearings could be changed, Hanson declined to comment before seeing the recommendations from his general counsel.
“It’s hard to say how much time we’re going to save right now because I don’t have those recommendations,” Hanson said. “In terms of, kind of, the timing or the implementation…we’re going to have to look at ‘what are those levers we can really pull?’
“What I don’t want to do is be an impediment, for the agency to be an impediment down the road,” Hanson said.
