Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff want to cancel a proposed rulemaking for spent fuel reprocessing, citing lack of interest and stakeholder concerns, according to a recent policy issue.
NRC operations director Margaret Doane submitted the March 5 commission request to discontinue the rulemaking, which was introduced in 2013 and would have laid groundwork to help companies apply for a federal license to build a spent fuel reprocessing facility.
In a meeting last year with industry and the public, “no industry stakeholders indicated that they plan to submit an application to the NRC for a reprocessing facility in the foreseeable future,” Doane wrote to the commission. “Other stakeholders, such as [the Union of Concerned Scientists] and members of the public, indicated they do not support the continuation of the rulemaking because of proliferation and other concerns.”
Even during the Donald Trump Administration, when the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy enthusiastically promoted the potential utility benefits of spent fuel reprocessing, there was little appetite in official Washington to prop up the practice, which has been practically anathema in the U.S. for decades.
At the same time, anti-nuclear groups have regularly sounded alarms about plutonium produced during reprocessing, which the existing commercial reactor fleet cannot use. Likewise, there is no geologic repository to dispose of waste from reprocessing.
Meanwhile, the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy last year set out to demonstrate the benefits of reprocessing as an untapped fuel resource. The agency said at the time that there was “no clear outcome” on where that effort would lead.
