Volatile might be the best word to describe the U.S. nuclear power industry in this century. Federal energy legislation has spurred interest in building new facilities, only for the 2011 Fukushima Daichii power plant disaster in Japan to spur second thoughts. Market forces and other challlenges have led to closures and planned shutdowns over facilities across the nation, but several of those plants appear to have been saved this summer.
Passage of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Clean Energy Standard could spur future nuclear policies that are more favorable to the industry. That legislation, which is estimated to pay upstate nuclear power generators up to $1 billion through 2019, is keeping three nuclear plants alive: James A. FitzPatrick, R.E. Ginna, and Nine Mile Point.
The opposite could be said of energy legislation that just failed to pass in Illinois, where the Clinton and Quad Cities plants are now set to close. Opponents there called the legislation a bailout for a profitable company, Exelon, which championed energy reform in both states. The utility owns all of these plants, except FitzPatrick, which it has agreed to buy from Entergy for $110 million.
The year-to-year landscape of the nuclear industry is a moving target, one to which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must adjust. Two senior NRC officials recently discussed the challenges and opportunities facing the industry with RadWaste Monitor. John Tappert, deputy director for the Division of Construction Inspection and Operational Programs in the Office of New Reactors, and Bruce Watson, Reactor Decommissioning Branch chief, also addressed two major projects the NRC is tackling: Project AIM, an initiative to improve workload efficiency and ensure the agency is properly staffed, and the decommissioning rulemaking, an effort to streamline the decommissioning process for shuttered nuclear facilities.
Both officials will also speak at the Exchange Monitor’s RadWaste Summit, which will be held Sept. 7-9 in Summerlin, Nev.
As far as the decommissioning work, more and more plants are shutting down. Is that a trend that has impacted your office?
Tappert: So there’s obviously a lot of volatility in the utility deciding the economic viability of some of these facilities going forward. I’m sure you’re following what New York state is doing about their policies regarding carbon-free generation capacity, and that may be reversing some of that trend. Exelon just announced that they have an agreement in principal with Entergy to buy FitzPatrick. They had told us that they had planned to shut down FitzPatrick early next year, and now it looks like that’s not going to be the case. Yes, I would say there’s been an uptick in decommissioning, but I would also say there’s a fair amount of uncertainty surrounding that.
Do you see other states following New York’s lead?
Tappert: I’m probably not qualified to make a statement on that. We’re observing it from a standpoint of we’re trying to plan our work and understand what the decommissioning workload is going forward, but I couldn’t tell you. Illinois is what everyone is looking at now, and I couldn’t tell you what they’re going to do.
Does New York’s decision directly affect your workload?
Tappert: Of course it does because we get the handoff of the decommissioning plants once they’ve shut down. If they don’t shut down, the work doesn’t come to us. It stays in another part of the agency. It just affects how we plan and coordinate the work. We can accommodate whatever the industry does, but it just helps us to know what they’re doing.
With your appearance at the RadWaste Summit, do you know what initiatives you’ll be discussing?
Tappert: I think we’re just giving an update on some of the rulemaking activities in regard to part 51 and low-level waste facilities. I’ll probably be talking about our plans for Great-Than-Class-C Waste (GTCC). The commission at the end of last year gave us some direction to work on that when we complete the part 61 rulemaking, so we’ll be starting that probably the beginning of next year, having some workshops. The decommissioning rulemaking – just giving an update on that. They completed the advanced notice of participatory rulemaking, and then digesting the comments from that and developing a regulatory basis on that. And then we recently sent up a paper, or we’re about to send up a paper on financial assurance for radioactive sealed sources, and probably mention that, as well.
How involved are you on the decommissioning rulemaking and the direction of the document? What would you like to see addressed in the rulemaking?
Tappert: Well, I think the questions were out there. I think we’re looking to improve the efficiency of the program. I think that rulemaking is being led by our operating reactor office, NRR, but we’re supporting. Bruce could probably speak to that better. His office is closer to that.
Watson: Obviously my branch is responsible for, by title, reactor decommissioning, so we have the programmatic responsibilities for all the licensing activities for licensing support and maintaining some consistency in the decommissioning inspection program, but we not only do power reactors, we do all the research reactors that are in our group at this time. And also I do support the other branches with uranium recovery activities, decommissioning activities, and some of the materials sites. So that’s pretty much what we do.
For this meeting, I’m going to talk about our current activities with respect to making some programmatic changes and updating some of the guidance that we have out there. Also looking at some of the current activities. As you know we have the new business model, probably not new anymore, where the license is transferred to a company to do the decommissioning. Probably make a few comments about that. We recently transferred the license for [the La Crosse Boiling Water Reactor in Wisconsin], from Dairyland to La Crosse Solutions. So make some comments on that, and also have a discussion on the current power reactor situation and the fact that we thought FitzPatrick was going to be shutting down. Obviously it looks like it’s going to continue to operate.
Right now we have six other plants that have announced they’re shutting down. Quite frankly it’s uncertain what’s really going to happen, other than I think Fort Calhoun is a sure bet that they’re going to go to decommissioning. And then talk about, because we don’t know what’s going to happen with Clinton or Quad Cities, or even Oyster Creek or Pilgrim, even though they announced they’re going to shut down by 2019. The other issue I want to talk about is our requirement for 60 years for completing the decommissioning. We have a number of sites that are in the 40-ish year of SAFSTOR, and they need to be starting to think a little bit about the fact that these units are there. The regulations require that they complete them by 60 years, so just go over that a little bit with the industry.
How did you prepare for FitzPatrick?
Tappert: We tried to be flexible, and it affects us more in our budget preparations, processes. How the federal budget works is we try to project out two years and estimate what our resource needs are going to be, so that’s where it mostly comes into play. We have processes in place to accommodate various licensing actions or requests as they come in, and we can respond in real-time to those. It’s more about planning from a budgetary standpoint.
Bruce, what commercial sites are you working with right now?
Watson: We’re not really working with them. We’re just starting a dialogue with the licensees, along with NRR, who handles the transition from operating to decommissioning, but I think the ones that have been in the news have been Fort Calhoun, Exelon’s Clinton and Quad Cities 2 and 3, and Oyster Creek has been out there a long time saying they’re shutting down in 2019, and then of course Pilgrim deferred to refuel again, or decided to refuel again and deferred permanent shutdown at least at this point from a new situation until 2019 also. We’ll see where it goes.
Were any of these decommissioning announcements a surprise?
Watson: I think to a certain degree all of them are kind of a surprise. I think when Kewanee and Vermont Yankee announced they were shutting down for economic reasons, I think that was kind of a surprise. San Onofre shutting down because of the steam generators and other issues was somewhat of a surprise, because I thought they were going to authorize them to operate at least another cycle. And then Crystal River had been shut down for a long time with their containment issues, so SONGS and Crystal River all had technical issues, which were going to cost a lot of money to fix. To a certain degree we expect the industry would, with the investment they have in these plants, to do their very best to put them back together safely so they can operate them, because the investment they have in them. So as a regulator, to a certain degree, they’re all surprises, but not unexpected. We do have an aging power reactor, a number of power reactors that are getting along in years, and so they are an investment, and in our system they’re supposed to make money.
Tappert: And we know that they’re all going to decommissioning eventually, so we have that in the back of our minds. The lead time varies, I guess is what you’re asking. So Oyster Creek announced many years ago they’re going to shut down in 2019. Fort Calhoun is going to be shutting down by the end of this year, and we just found that out in the April-May time frame, so the lead time varies, and we try to be flexible enough to accommodate them.
A lot of the commissioners talk about the changing landscape for nuclear plants since 2000 – I think the agency was planning on an expanding workload, is that correct?
Tappert: Back in 2000 is when our license renewal program really started getting up and running and extending the life of plants for an additional 20 years. And then you had the 9/11 event that kind of revamped the entire security efforts, and a lot of people point to 2005 as another point. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 created a number of incentives for new nuclear generation, and that caused a lot of interest in the industry and new reactors. And as a result we created a whole new office for new reactors, and there were a lot of applications in here. We were doing a lot of reviews. Entergy’s building four new reactors in South Carolina at Vogtle and Summer right now. But then between Fukushima and natural gas prices and the big recession, a lot of that generation hasn’t come to pass. That’s why you get into a lot of these Project AIM discussions about how we’re kind of trying to reinvent the agency to be leaner and more nimble, so it’s a little bit of an arc depending on how far back you want to go.
And with all the downsizing, or rightsizing, as a lot of people like to say, is there a noticeable difference in the two offices?
Tappert: Obviously that has an impact. If you have less operating reactors, you have less staff in the operating reactor office, and you need more in the decommissioning office. So you’re seeing that readjustment consistent with an overall declining rightsizing of the entire workforce of the agency. You’re seeing people, staff moving from one office to another, where the work exists. I think that’s appropriate, and that’s working well.
And do you think the supply and demand are in balance?
Tappert: There’s always going to be a demand signal somewhere, but I think we have mechanisms in place to respond to that, so I think we’re on a good trajectory.
