The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s timeline for completing its regulatory update on disposal of low-level radioactive waste has slid further to the right, though an agency official cautioned Wednesday the latest schedule remains tentative.
During a meeting with nuclear industry stakeholders, the NRC presented a Sept. 17 schedule update on the Part 61 rulemaking. That shows a 90-day comment period on the anticipated supplemental rule beginning in February, followed by completion of the final rule from May through February 2021 and implementation through February 2022.
In the schedule issued less than three months earlier, on June 30, the 90-day comment period was shown to start in October. The final rule proceeding would have run from January to October of next year and implementation from November 2020 through the following October.
“On this rulemaking the dates that we’re putting in there are really a placeholder. We don’t necessarily expect it to be out at that date,” Gary Comfort, with the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, said during the presentation.
There was no immediate explanation for the cause of the schedule shift between the June and September updates.
This would be the latest in a series of delays in completing the rulemaking covering Part 61 of the rules for the NRC in the Code of Federal Regulations. For example: In July 2018, the supplemental rule was expected to be published early this year.
The rulemaking, which dates to 2009, is intended to update federal regulations on disposal of commercial low-level waste in land-disposal facilities. Specifically, it will address disposal of certain waste streams, particularly depleted uranium from commercial uranium enrichment, that were not considered when the original rule language was formulated.
Staff submitted the draft final rule to the commission in September 2016. Among its provisions: A compliance period of 1,000 or 10,000 years, based on the amounts of long-lived radionuclides that are or will be emplaced for disposal; requiring a new technical analysis on safety of “inadvertent intruders” to a disposal site, including a compliance period and a dose limit; and a directive to update technical analyses at the point of site closure.
In September 2017, the commission directed staff to make five significant changes to the draft final rule, including applying the new rules only to facilities that intend to take large amounts of depleted uranium and re-applying a 1,000-year compliance period from the proposed rule.
