Lower disposal costs mean nuclear reactor operators will not need to keep as much cash on hand to cover the cost of end-of-life plant cleanup, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said last week.
Two of the four U.S. disposal sites for low-level radioactive waste, the two used by most NRC licensees, are charging “moderately lower” rates for their services, the agency wrote in the draft version of its latest Report on Waste Burial Charges: Changes in Decommissioning Waste Disposal Costs at Low-Level Waste Burial Facilities.
That means that even with prices rising at the other two low-level disposal sites, licensees can expect “minimum decommissioning fund requirements that are lower, on average,” the NRC wrote in a summary of the report posted Nov. 19 in the Federal Register. The draft report itself is dated Nov. 14, according to NRC’s online public records repository.
Licensees must annually update, in public reports to the NRC, the estimated costs of decommissioning their reactors. NRC provides a formula to help licensees write these estimates. Reports such as the one published earlier this month feed into those calculations.
Members of the public will be allowed to comment on the draft report until Dec. 19, the agency said in the Federal Register notice. The figures in the latest version of the low-level waste report, the 20th revision of the document, were current as of July, NRC wrote in the draft report.
