By John Stang
Transporting spent nuclear reactor fuel across the country and through New Mexico topped public concerns during a public event Wednesday on plans for an interim storage facility in the state.
That included wondering which routes would be used.
“An accident with this material will take decades, if not centuries, to deal with,” said one participant who called into the meeting.
Mostly by phone, 20 people talked to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials in Rockville, Md., about what should be studied in an environmental review of Holtec International’s license application for its proposed storage site, which the company hopes to open by 2022.
This is the first of four NRC scoping meetings for its environmental impact statement. Similar hearings are scheduled in three southeastern New Mexico cities next week: Roswell on Monday, Hobbs on Tuesday, and Carlsbad on Thursday.
The scoping period for the environmental review ends May 29. A draft environmental impact study report is scheduled to be ready by June 2019, followed by a public comment period of at least 45 days. The final report is expected to be complete in mid-to-late 2020.
The environmental study is supposed to cover geology, water, public health, scenic matters, transportation, waste management, and other issues that might be raised during the scoping period. It is part of the broader technical review of the license application, which also covers safety and security matters.
In March 2017, the New Jersey-based energy technology company submitted its application to store 8,680 metric tons of spent fuel at a facility to be built in Lea County, east of Carlsbad. Ultimately, the facility could hold up to 120,000 metric tons of waste within hermetically sealed canisters that would be stored vertically underground.
The NRC in February completed its acceptance review of the application, shifting to the full technical review that Chairman Kristine Svinicki said Wednesday should take about three years. The commission will not rule on the request until this final environmental impact report is done, as well as a corresponding safety review and any hearings addressing concerns raised by organizations that are granted intervener status on the matter.
The NRC expects to publish a Federal Register notice in the near future for individuals or groups to request an intervenor hearing on Holtec’s application. The notice will start a 60-day period for filing hearing petitions. Petitioners have to meet two basic criteria — show that they could be directly affected by the proposed facility and offer a specific challenge to the application. These hearings are usually conducted by the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, which then makes a recommendation to the commission.
An attorney for the Sierra Club this week told RadWaste Monitor the environmental group plans to request intervenor status, and that other groups are likely to do the same.
Of the 20 people who spoke to the NRC by phone on Wednesday, most said they live in New Mexico. Their primary concern was transportation: what routes would be used, what measures would be taken against accidents, and if moving the fuel across country by rail is the safest course of action.
Several people said they cannot intelligently comment on transportation matters until they know which specific railroads will be used. ”Because we don’t know what routes will be used, the NRC will have to know what will happen on all the routes,” said Navajo tribal member Leona Morgan.
Studied routes should not be limited to New Mexico, but rather should include all approaches across the country the fuel could take, several said. “Transportation must be examined thoroughly. … There will be hundreds of communities affected by the (environmental impact study),” said David Kraft, director of the Nuclear Energy Information Service, a Chicago-based nongovernmental organization opposed to nuclear power.
“You must have hearings around all of the transportation routes,” said Gale Sidell, who was calling from the Albuquerque area in northern New Mexico.
Roughly 80,000 metric tons of spent reactor fuel is now stored on-site at 77 nuclear power sites in 33 states, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Wednesday during a hearing on the NRC budget. Under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the Department of Energy is responsible for disposal of that waste. There is still no permanent repository for the used fuel, and interim storage in a small number of locations has been seen as a means for DOE to begin meeting its congressional mandate.
Some speakers on Wednesday wondered whether keeping the spent fuel on storage pads at the reactors of origin might be safer.
“For folks on the East Coast, maybe it’s better not to move it, and leave it on the (ground’s concrete) surface,” said Ray Lutz, executive director of San Diego County-based watchdog Citizens’ Oversight.
Don Hancock, nuclear waste program director at the Albuquerque-based Southwest Research and Information Center, echoed that suggestion. He said the NRC’s environmental impact study should look at the median and maximum amounts of radioactivity that Holtec carries in the canisters.
Also, the question of whether a permanent used nuclear fuel repository will ever be built at Yucca Mountain, Nev., sparked fear that the Holtec site could end up more than an interim disposal site, along with a planned site in West Texas that would be operated by Waste Control Specialists and Orano USA.
“New Mexico does not want to be the de facto repository for the nation’s high-level fuel rods,” Sidell said.
The NRC should not approve Holtec’s site without a long-term plan that ensures Yucca Mountain or another permanent repository will be built, said Dianne D’Arrigo, radioactive waste project director for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, of Takoma Park, Md.
The NRC has requested $47.7 million in its fiscal 2019 budget proposal to resume adjudication of the DOE license application for Yucca Mountain. Congress zeroed out the regulator’s $20 million request for this budget year in the omnibus spending bill signed into law in March, and to date has not looked kindly on the Energy Department’s corresponding $110 million request in both budgets for its own Yucca licensing work.
During Wednesday’s Senate budget hearing, Svinicki said the NRC has enough money in its current budget and fiscal 2019 proposal to manage reviews of the applications for both the New Mexico and Texas consolidated interim storage sites.
“We have sufficient resources for two spent nuclear fuel applications,” she told the few members of the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee who appeared at the hearing.
The NRC has requested $24.8 million for spent fuel projects in fiscal 2019, most of which will go to the Holtec application and the expected WCS-Orano request. That is an increase from $22.3 million in fiscal 2018. Meanwhile, the number of people involved with these projects will drop from 102 to 100 in fiscal 2019.
Svinicki, with fellow Commissioners Stephen Burns and Jeff Baran, testified for about an hour on their $970.7 million budget request.
Subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) – as he has before – zeroed in on interim storage as a potentially faster means for addressing the decades-old nuclear waste impasse. The lawmaker tried to pin down Svinicki on how long it would take to build the storage facilities. She did not provide any specific timelines other than saying “it doesn’t take years and years to do that.” The NRC chair speculated that parts of the facilities could be phased into operation while other parts are still under construction.
Waste Control Specialists in April 2016 submitted its license application for a facility in Andrews County, Texas, with capacity for up to 40,000 metric tons. A year later, the company asked the NRC to suspend its review while it awaited its sale from holding company Valhi Inc. to nuclear services provider EnergySolutions. The U.S. Justice Department had sued to block the sale on antitrust grounds, and a federal judge ruled against the deal last June. Waste Control Specialists was acquired in January by private equity firm J.F. Lehman.
Svinicki said the NRC has informally heard that the WCS-Orano partnership will revive the license application, but that it has not submitted an official request that the license application review be resumed.
Alexander and Feinstein voiced concern about how long the two interim storage sites — which would be initially licensed for 40 years — would actually be in use given the situation with Yucca Mountain. They were concerned that fuel might be stored in those two locations beyond 40 years or possibly permanently. “This is where the whole issue becomes problematic. … I am really worried,” Feinstein said.
