The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the current federal fiscal 2019 anticipates collecting $781.9 million in fees from its licensees, slightly less than it brought in last year.
The agency’s budget for fiscal 2019, under the multi-agency “minibus” appropriations bill signed into law in September, is $911 million. That is down by $11 million from the prior fiscal year, according to a Jan. 31 notice in the Federal Register.
Under the 1990 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, the NRC collects 90 percent of its yearly budget through service and annual fees on licensees, minus some excluded areas. Those include international operations, waste incidental to reprocessing activities, generic homeland security work, and providing inspector general services for the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. They will cut out $43.4 million from the fee total for the budget year ending Sept. 30.
Of the total fee take, $246.7 million is expected to come from service fees and $535.2 million from annual fees on licensees.
Comparatively, the NRC in fiscal 2018 collected $280.8 million in services fees and $508.5 million in annual fees – for a total of $789.3 million, $7.4 million more than it plans for this year.
Fiscal 2019 funding in the spent fuel storage and reactor decommissioning line item is projected at $35.6 million, a small step up from $33.8 million allocated last year. The increase, according to the Federal Register notice, is due to several factors: a greater number of finance evaluations and license actions related to decommissioning of nuclear power reactors; two reviews of license applications for consolidated interim storage sites for spent nuclear fuel; and renewals of spent fuel storage pad licenses for the Three Mile Island Unit 2, Trojan, and Rancho Seco nuclear power plants.
The $19.9 million in anticipated annual fee billing drops significantly from final billing of $24.2 million for fiscal 2018. Both covered 122 spent fuel storage facilities. That amount is down largely because the service fee billing is due to rise from $10.2 million to $16.5 million, on the back of the spent fuel storage licensing applications and increased decommissioning-related workload.
