Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
8/22/2014
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission earlier this month approved a plan to merge the programs within the Office of Federal and State Materials and Environmental Management Programs back into the Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards. With the NRC’s changing workload, the NRC staff launched a working group last year to review the organizational structure of the materials and waste management programs, and determined that FSME programs would function more efficiently within NMSS. “With the focus shifting to long-term waste storage and disposal strategies, and an increasing number of nuclear plants moving to decommissioning, the group recommended merging FSME’s programs back into NMSS,” NRC Merge Coordinator and Director of Intergovernmental Liaison and Rulemaking Chris Miller said in a NRC blog post on Aug. 7. “We think this new structure will better enable us to meet future challenges. It will improve internal coordination, balance our workload and provide greater flexibility to respond to a dynamic environment.”
Miller said the merger will take effect on Oct. 5 with current work functions at the staff level remaining mostly unchanged. The biggest changes will take place in the management structure, resulting in fewer divisions and managers, Miller said. The NRC is still determining how to make the merger work along with who will go where, NRC spokesman David McIntyre said, but once that is complete, personnel announcements will be made. “I’m not sure that’s all determined yet,” McIntyre said. “There was a (non-public) staff paper, and the Commission is going back and forth on an SRM, and I think they’re rearranging the deckchairs, so to speak. I think once they’re finished, we’ll have some answers and maybe some personnel announcements.”
Originally, the programs under FSME were under the NMSS banner, but back in 2006, under the thought that spent nuclear fuel related-licensing was going to increase, the NRC spun off the FSME programs into its own entity. According to Miller, NMSS retained fuel cycle facilities, high-level waste disposal, spent fuel storage, and radioactive material transportation while FSME worked on regulating industrial, commercial, and medical uses of radioactive materials and uranium recovery activities and also decommissioning of nuclear facilities and power plants. Part of the reasoning for the merger, Miller said, was to reduce overhead costs and improve the ratio of staff to management while also improving efficiency.
