The Nuclear Regulatory Commission isn’t looking too closely at disposal or repurposing of spent nuclear fuel from future advanced reactors, the agency’s fuel safety chief told a National Academies panel Tuesday.
NRC won’t regulate the back end of the advanced fuel cycle until it has “a firmer idea of what advanced reactor developers are looking for,” said James Rubenstone, chief of the Material Control and Accounting Branch in the commission’s fuel safety division.
The commission wants to hear more from advanced reactor developers about whether they want to move to a closed fuel cycle and on what timeframe, Rubenstone said at Tuesday’s virtual meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) session on used nuclear fuel and advanced reactors.
Congress, for its part, has dipped its toes in the advanced nuclear debate as the Joe Biden administration explores subsidies for the industry. The Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing March 25 on nuclear energy and advanced technologies were a topic of discussion.
Even at this early stage, NRC isn’t ignoring the back end entirely, Rubenstone said Tuesday, but it doesn’t want to “get ahead of” advanced reactor programs that aren’t yet operational.
“We’re certainly looking at the long term issues related to ultimate disposition of fuels from advanced reactors and how that fits into the overall national approach for treatment of high level waste in the U.S.,” Rubenstone said.
Rubenstone added that developers of advanced reactors are more focused in the short term on getting their designs safely operational and that they have “limited awareness or commitment to safeguards consideration, because of a lack of knowledge.”
“Perhaps we’re seeing a little disconnect between the reactor developers and the ultimate operators in terms of who’s going to be left holding [spent fuel],” Rubenstone said. Still, Rubenstone noted, it’s the ultimate responsibility of the federal government to solve the issue of spent fuel disposal.
Tuesday’s NASEM session was the fifth meeting of the organization’s Congressionally-mandated panel on advanced nuclear technologies and waste streams.
The committee was formed in response to the 2020 omnibus spending bill, passed in 2019, and is tasked with providing the Department of Energy and Congress with a report on advanced nuclear waste streams and volumes, according to a conference statement that accompanied the bill. The panel plans to submit its recommendations by August 2022.
