In late May, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will publish draft guidelines for power plant owners who wish to use decommissioning funds to replace plant equipment, an agency official said Thursday.
When the interim guidance from NRC staff appears, the public, including the nuclear industry, will be allowed to comment on it and suggest changes that will be published later. Shawn Harwell, the NRC financial analyst who made the announcement during a Microsoft Teams meeting with the public, did not say how much later.
As more owners and operators join the cascade of nuclear power plants seeking license extensions after a round of federal bailouts in last year’s two big infrastructure bills, some in industry want to tap into decommissioning trust funds to fund replacement of items known in the regulatory schema as major radioactive components.
In 2019, industry representatives petitioned the NRC to unlock the decommissioning trust funds, reserved for radioactive cleanup after a plant shutters, to pay for replacing major components. Among others, these include things such as reactor vessel heads. The industry asked the commission for a rulemaking on the subject but the NRC in 2020 said no.
“We’re not there yet,” Harwell said Thursday.
There are also some bureaucratic rules blocking the NRC from rewriting the rules about using decommissioning funds for equipment replacement.
The commission has been slowly overhauling its regulations for power plants transitioning from operations to decommissioning. Until that’s done, and Harwell said “we don’t know how long that’s going to be,” the commission cannot revise its decommissioning regulations to allow the use of trust funds for equipment replacement.
Broadly, NRC’s intent with this decommissioning rulemaking is to relieve companies doing decommissioning from some regulatory requirements that, the commission says, make sense for an operating plant but not a plant that’s being torn down.
At the meeting, a former NRC executive turned consultant tried to sum up why some in industry want to use their decommissioning trust funds for equipment replacements.
When a major radioactive component is up for replacement, it either has to be torn out and held on site until a plant is decommissioned, or torn out and sent to a disposal site immediately, said Larry Camper, the former director of NRC’s Division of Waste Management and Environmental Protection.
Letting plant owners ship big components off sooner rather than later could save money and time by doing away with the need to build temporary waste storage sites at the plants, Camper said.
“The fundamental definition of decommissioning needs to be changed,” Camper said.
