The Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week issued five “substantive revisions” to the draft final rule updating the federal regulations on disposal of low-level radioactive waste.
The updated rule will be published as a supplemental proposed rule for 90 days of public comment, according to a Sept. 8 staff-requirements memo from Annette Vietti-Cook, secretary of the commission, to NRC Executive Director for Operations Victor McCree.
“Once the comments are in, the staff will develop a final rule for the Commission to consider. As the revisions are extensive, I would expect them to take some considerable amount of time,” an NRC spokesman said by email Monday.
The commission is amending 10 CFR 61 to broadly mandate updated site-specific technical evaluations; to allow preparation of site-specific criteria for accepting low-level radioactive waste based on the findings of the studies; and to aid in enactment and hew the directives more closely to existing health and safety measures. The process began nearly a decade ago when it became clear that Part 61 did not specifically address the effect of certain waste streams, such as depleted uranium. Staff submitted the proposed rule to the commission last September.
The revisions required by the commission are: reinstating employment of a case-by-case basis, or grandfathering, for placing new directives solely to facilities that intend to house significant amounts of deployed uranium; reinstating the 1,000-year compliance term with a dose maximum of 25 millirem per year; make clear the safety case involves the quantitative performance assessment, augmented by evaluation of defense-in-depth measures; revise the draft rule language on defense-in-depth so that it considers only offering more assurance in mitigating the impacts of large uncertainties found during the performance assessment; and ensuring the final rule is “informed by broader and more fully integrated, but reasonably foreseeable, costs and benefits to the U.S. waste disposal system resulting from the proposed rule changes, including pass-through costs to waste generators and processors.”
The updated Part 61 rule would take effect one year after being published. The four current low-level radioactive waste disposal sites are all in NRC “agreement states” – South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Washington – which would have three years to enact corresponding rules.
