The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s guidance on decommissioning of nuclear power plants has not kept up with an increasingly popular business model in the industry, the agency’s Inspector General’s Office said in a report this week.
The “Audit of NRC’s Transition Process for Decommissioning Power Reactors” found generally that the federal agency effectively oversees sites as they shift from operations to decommissioning. However, it identified areas for improvement.
Among them are outdated decommissioning guidance documents kept by the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation and Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards. The former document has not been refreshed since 2002 and the latter has been largely unchanged since its publication in 2007, the IG said.
This can create complications as the NRC processes applications to transfer a plant’s federal licenses from the owner and operator to another company that would assume all responsibility for decommissioning, site restoration, and spent fuel management. The agency completed its first proceeding of this type last year for the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, and so far in 2019 has approved license transfers for the Oyster Creek Generating Station in New Jersey and the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts.
Agency “staff mentioned a recent license transfer request has posed some logistical problems. A licensee recently submitted its [mandatory post-shutdown decommissioning activities report] simultaneously with a license transfer request, the PSDAR of the proposed decommissioning company, and related exemptions for both entities,” the IG report says. “The licensee also asked for it to be completed on an expedited basis. This strained NRC resources since staff had to review everything at once, to include the review of the PSDAR and exemption requests from an entity that was not yet the licensee.”
This creates the situation is which staff could be evaluating documents from a company that might not be approved to assume the site licenses, the IG said.
