The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has suspended work on a study of potential regulatory updates for disposal of very low-level radioactive waste (VLLW) while it considers other approaches to the matter.
As recently as March, the agency said it expected to issue its findings before the end of spring. However, staff is now separately gearing up to evaluate the scope of “acceptable disposal” of very low-level waste under federal regulations on general requirements for waste disposal (10 CFR 20.2001) , according to a Sept. 16 letter from John Lubinski, director of the NRC Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, to the Nuclear Energy Institute.
“The process that would allow the use of 20.2001 in certain cases is just a proposal under consideration at this time,” NRC spokesman David McIntyre said by email. “We have not determined any details on how this would be implemented at this point. As a result, we have put the VLLW scoping study on hold while we consider how to proceed on 20.2001.”
There was no word by deadline Thursday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing on when, or if, the scoping study would resume.
The study was the outgrowth of the agency’s 2016 “programmatic assessment” of low-level radioactive waste regulations. It was intended, according to a 2018 notice in the Federal Register, “to identify possible options to improve and strengthen the NRC’s regulatory framework for the disposal of the anticipated large volumes of VLLW associated with the decommissioning of nuclear power plants and material sites, as well as waste that might be generated by alternative waste streams that may be created by operating reprocessing facilities or a radiological event.”
Very low-level waste is not an official NRC designation, but rather the informal term for the least radioactive form of Class A radioactive waste. Class A, which comprises about 90 percent of all low-level radioactive waste, is the least-radioactive material with an official classification.
