The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the current federal fiscal year 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. The remaining funding is appropriated by Congress.
Fee exclusion areas 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 fees for services such as inspections and licensing reviews. Annual fees on nuclear power plants and other NRC licensees would generate the remaining $535.2 million.
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.
Total budgeted resources for fiscal 2019 in the spent fuel storage and reactor decommissioning fee item are projected at $35.6 million, a small step up from $33.8 million last year. The increase, according to the Federal Register notice, is due to several factors: a greater number of financial 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, which would each be charged $163,000 for fiscal 2019.
The annual fee 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.
The NRC is conducting technical reviews of two applications for 40-year licenses for spent fuel storage projects: Holtec International’s planned facility for up to 173,000 metric tons of used fuel in Lea County, N.M.; and an Orano-Waste Control Specialists venture for up to 40,000 metric tons in Andrews County, Texas. The facilities could help the Department of Energy meet its legal mandate to remove spent fuel from commercial nuclear power reactors — a stockpile now around 80,000 metric tons spread around 34 states.
Separately, the NRC anticipates collecting $24.8 million in annual fees on nuclear fuel facilities, down from $27.7 million in fiscal 2018. Total budgeted resources in this area are proposed to shrink from $35.2 million to an even $30 million. The reductions are “primarily due to aligning resources with a smaller projected workload,” the Federal Register notice says.
The service fee receipts are planned to drop from $9.2 million to $7.2 million, due to the expected withdrawal of the license application and construction authorization for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility that until recently was being built at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. After spending more than $5 billion on the project, DOE in October formally terminated construction. It says it has a cheaper method for the original mission of the MFFF, disposal of surplus plutonium, and wants to convert the plant to produce fissile cores for nuclear warheads.
The NRC is taking comments on the fee plan through March 4. Comments can be submitted at regulations.gov, Docket ID NRC-2017-0032; via email to [email protected]; by fax to Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, at 301-415-1101; by mail to Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001, ATTN: Rulemakings and Adjudications Staff; or in person at NRC headquarters, 11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Md.
The deadline for comments will not be extended, the NRC said, to help ensure the agency can collect all fees by the end of the fiscal year.
As of Friday, only one comment had been filed. The anonymous submitter generally addressed nuclear safety rather than the specific fee plan.
The NRC normally would issue its new budget plan in February. But the rollout for fiscal 2020 might have been delayed by the recent partial shutdown of the federal government — even though the NRC was not directly impacted as its full-year appropriations bill had already been passed. The agency referred questions on the budget schedule to the White House Office of Management and Budget, which did not respond to multiple queries.
