The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued an Order yesterday outlining the path forward for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository licensing review, headed by the completion and release of the Safety Evaluation Reports associated with the construction authorization application. The Order also calls on the Department of Energy to complete a supplemental environmental impact statement that NRC staff requested under the National Environmental Policy Act to complete the review. “The next significant milestone in the Appendix D schedule is issuance of the SER; to conform to our regulatory scheme to the extent practicable, it makes sense to proceed with the SER as the next step in this licensing process,” the Order said. “In addition, completion of the SER volumes is a discrete task that may be completed with existing funds, not a long-term task that would likely require substantial “orderly closure” expenditures (to facilitate orderly resumption at some future date) if Congress does not appropriate new funds before current funds are exhausted.” The Order also continues to hold the adjudication in abeyance due to the limited funds to complete all of the necessary steps, and it also declines to establish the Licensing Support Network, although it does recommend all LSN documents be loaded into a non-public ADAMS database.
NRC Chair Allison Macfarlane is not sure whether the $11 million of funding on hand would be enough to finish the SERs, she told reporters on the sidelines of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board workshop. "We don’t know. We are going to have to see,” she said. “We are going to have to reconstitute the staff and then we have to start going through the process. We’ll see what comes up. I don’t want to make any predictions." If it is not enough funding, she said the NRC would "not necessarily" ask for more money for Yucca Mountain in its budget request. "The court order is to use the existing funding," she said.
A three judge panel from the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit voted 2-1 to issue a writ of mandamus on Aug. 13 compelling the Commission to finish the licensing review. The petition for a writ of mandamus was filed by parties that included the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners; Nye County, Nev.; the states of South Carolina and Washington; and Aiken County, S.C. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires a decision by the NRC on the Yucca Mountain license application within three years of its submission, a deadline that passed in 2011. Meanwhile, the NRC shut down its repository licensing process in 2010, citing several justifications such as lack of funds to complete licensing. After the court’s decision, the NRC issued an Order for information from stakeholders on how best to use the limited funds to re-start the licensing review. Many of the responses pointed to the release of the SERs as an important first step.
