The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will prepare a full environmental impact statement (EIS) on Westinghouse’s application to renew the license for its Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility in South Carolina.
The EIS would replace a draft environmental assessment and finding of no significant impact (FONSI) issued last October by the federal regulator. The agency changed course after receiving new data in March from Westinghouse’s site investigations of its property, according to a June 5 press release.
“Based on the NRC’s independent evaluation of the new data as part of the [environmental assessment] process, the NRC decided it could no longer conclude that renewal of the license would result in a finding of no significant impact,” the release says. “As a result, the NRC will proceed with an EIS.”
The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHEC) in February received data from 40 groundwater monitoring wells and other material samples taken around the Westinghouse property. It forwarded the findings to the NRC in March, and in April asked the federal agency to prepare a full EIS for relicensing.
In that request, SCDHEC Site Assessment, Remediation, and Revitalization Division Director G. Kendall Taylor cited a number of concerns he said called for a deeper environmental review. Among those, he said the draft environmental assessment did not adequately address infrastructure issues related to the facility’s extended longevity through 2067, along with the potential for earthquake hazards.
The new information of particular concern involved on-site contamination and potential avenues for contamination to migrate off the property, NRC spokesman Roger Hannah said by email Monday. While he did not discuss details, the Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility has been a source of on-site radiological and nonradiological contamination in soil, surface water, and groundwater, according to the NRC.
The EIS process will begin with a notice in the Federal Register, the NRC said. The agency has not yet finalized its schedule for publication or the review process, Hannah said Thursday.
The special nuclear material license for the 51-year-old production facility for nuclear power plant fuel expires on Sept. 30, 2027. Westinghouse in 2014 applied for a 40-year renewal.
The NRC’s draft environmental assessment was 126 pages, covering topics including land use; geology, seismology, and soils; surface water and ground water resources; climatology, meteorology, and air quality; and historic and cultural resources. In the document, agency staff determined that there would be no significant environmental impact in authorizing the plant to operate for another four decades.
The environmental impact statement would go deeper than the previous assessment on the need for an action, in this case the renewed license, as well as alternatives and effects from the action. (For comparison, a recent draft EIS for a proposed spent nuclear fuel storage site in New Mexico ran to 488 pages.)
“The exact scope of the EIS will not be determined until comments made during the scoping period are evaluated, but it will include a broader and more comprehensive look at the areas considered as part of the environmental assessment,” according to Hannah.
The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control said it had not received any details from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission regarding the EIS process. “DHEC does not have authority when it comes to the license renewal of Westinghouse. That decision is up to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” spokesman Chris Delcamp said by email Tuesday.
Westinghouse did not respond to a query on the matter.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission previously withdrew a June 2018 environmental assessment on the license application after a series of accidents at the 550,000-square-foot facility near the capital city of Columbus. Those included a July 2018 equipment leak that deposited uranium into the plant’s subsurface and the December 2018 finding that uranium levels in the groundwater below the plant were above drinking standards.
