The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Thursday formally rejected a petition from a California advocacy group to update federal regulations to require toughening of dry-cask storage of spent fuel at nuclear power plants.
The agency said the regulatory infrastructure already in place obviates the need for the Hardened, Extended-Life, Local, Monitored Surface Storage (HELMS) approach put forth by Citizens’ Oversight.
“The NRC maintains that a strong regulatory framework including both regulatory oversight and licensee compliance is important to the continued safe storage of spent fuel,” according to a summary of the decision published in the Federal Register. “The NRC’s regulatory framework for spent fuel storage is supported by well-developed regulatory guidance; voluntary domestic and international consensus standards; research and analytical studies; and processes for implementing licensing reviews, inspection programs, and enforcement oversight.”
The commission itself issued the decision, which can be appealed to the federal courts, an NRC spokesman said Friday. Citizens’ Oversight founder and head Ray Lutz did not respond to requests for comment on the ruling.
The El Cajon group in January 2018 filed the petition for multiple amendments to federal regulations on licensing requirements for independent storage of spent nuclear fuel, high-level waste, and reactor-related Greater-Than-Class C Waste.
Current regulations are not sufficient to promote safe, possibly indefinite, storage of radioactive used fuel on-site at nuclear power plants around the country, Citizens’ Oversight said in the petition. It noted that the Department of Energy’s radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., was supposed to be open by Jan. 31, 1998. Instead, it remains unbuilt, unlicensed, and unfunded.
This leaves about 82,000 metric tons of used fuel assemblies in storage at more than 70 nuclear plants around the country. That amount grows by up to 2,500 metric tons each year, according to the Energy Department.
The NRC licenses used-fuel storage casks in 40-year increments, without limiting the number of renewals.
“There is no deep geologic repository, and we assert that the SNF [spent nuclear fuel] is so thermally and radioactively ‘hot’ that, even if a deep geologic repository were available for use, it could not be used for many decades or centuries without active cooling,” Lutz stated in his petition. “If Yucca Mountain were open today and put into use, it would have to be actively cooled for some 100 to 200 years,2 effectively placing that waste on the surface. Thus, the actual situation has now changed, while the NRC regulations have not changed sufficiently to respect the current reality.”
The HELMS approach is intended to address that situation. As laid out in the petition, it would involve: hardening storage systems, including a strong outer building, in case of a terrorist attack or “other unpredictable events”; extended-life, with storage canisters featuring a 1,000-year design life and 300-year passive life; keeping the used fuel local, at a limited number of regional consolidated interim storage locations rather than storage sites that would take material from around the country; monitored, with a set electronics package for continuous use over a period of decades; and on the surface, because the waste is “simply too hot” for geologic disposal, which in any case is not yet available.
The NRC addressed each component of Lutz’s proposal in its Federal Register notice.
For example, on hardened storage, the agency noted that earthquakes and other potential natural disasters much be considered under federal law in applications for dry-cask storage systems and facilities. The systems themselves must be able to withstand such an event. “For these reasons, the NRC finds its regulations … provide an adequate framework to evaluate the capabilities of dry cask storage systems and facilities to withstand a wide range of extreme natural events,” the decision says.
Existing regulations also require measures against acts of terrorism, according to the agency, including that spent fuel must be stored in protected areas with multiple barriers to access and continuous surveillance.
The existing regulatory framework for dry-cask storage is also sufficient, the NRC said. Under Citizens’ Oversight proposal, localized but centralized storage could only be built 5 miles or more from any important waterway, and would have to be 300 feet above sea level if within 30 miles of an ocean, among other restrictions.
The NRC reiterated that today’s rules require storage systems that “are compatible” with the surrounding environment, are developed with the potential for “the most severe natural phenomena” possible in a given area, and are built to survive such an event.
While the Citizens’ Oversight proposal was nationwide in reach, the organization has focused on dry storage at the retired San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in San Diego County, Calif. Lutz’s group was the plaintiff in a 2015 lawsuit that sought to halt expansion of the plant’s dry-cask storage pad to accommodate used fuel from reactor Units 2 and 3 following their shutdown in 2013.
That lawsuit ultimately led to a 2017 settlement under which SONGS majority owner Southern California Edison was allowed to proceed with the spent-fuel offload to storage while agreeing to pursue “commercially reasonable” measures to find an off-site location for about 3.5 million pounds of used fuel assemblies from three reactors. That process continues.
Last fall, Lutz’s group asked a California Superior Court judge to order a temporary halt to the fuel transfer to allow time to determine whether Edison is meeting its obligations under the settlement. The judge refused.
