March 17, 2014

NRC EXPLORES IMPLEMENTATION OF BRC RECOMMENDATIONS, BUT CURRENT LAW A BARRIER

By ExchangeMonitor

Though the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is capable of authorizing a centralized interim storage facility for U.S. spent nuclear fuel now, as the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future recommended in January, actual operation of such a site could be significantly delayed until current national law gets tweaked, NRC officials said yesterday. Currently, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act mandates that the NRC license a geologic repository before construction of an interim storage site can begin, Brittain Hill, senior advisor at the NRC told the agency’s commissioners at a meeting yesterday. “The NRC has the appropriate regulatory framework to support licensing of a centralized interim storage facility, operated by either a government or commercial organization. Our regulations for storage, however, incorporate some siting restrictions that were developed in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act,” Hill said. “Construction of the storage facility could not begin until NRC issued a license for the geologic repository.”

Licensing a geologic repository is a long ways off for the NRC. The agency is focused on its near term goal of following up on another BRC recommendation: revising its Part 61 guidance to serve as generic geological repository requirements. “The BRC recommends that NRC and EPA develop new generic regulations and standards for geologic disposal,” Hill said at the meeting yesterday. “In the past several years the NRC staff has been working on enhancing the technical information that could support potential revisions for deep geologic disposal regulation. … From our perspective, developing revisions to our Part 60 generic rule for geologic disposal appears to be a significant rulemaking effort. Our understanding of the technical issues has evolved considerably since the technical requirements in Part 60 were finalized in 1983.” Hill told the commissioners that the first steps in that process would begin like any other NRC rulemaking. “You need to do a thoughtful regulatory analysis, a gap analysis, and see what are the potential regulatory and technical gaps that staff would need to develop additional information to support going to development of the draft rule.”

Staff had some good news for short-term work: the generic regulation rulemaking, they believe, could be done before any changes to the NWPA are implemented. “My personal opinion is that there certainly are some limits in [the NWPA], but I believe that those limits are workable and we can develop much of the regulation and either go forward with a draft regulation that can accommodate statutory standard requirements or have a limited focused rulemaking to address those statutory requirements as needed,” Hill told the commission. “I believe the gist of what we’d need to do in revising Part 60 can be done in a very policy-neutral, technically focused framework.”

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