The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in October plans to reorganize its Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards (NMSS), including combining two divisions.
The reorganization will take effect on Oct. 13, officials said during a meeting Wednesday with nuclear fuel cycle industry representatives at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md. It will be headlined by the merger of the NMSS Division of Fuel Cycle Safety, Safeguards, and Environmental Review and the Division of Spent Fuel Management into a single Division of Fuel Management.
Two new “Centers of Excellence” on environmental and financial matters will also be established within NMSS, according to a letter sent on Sept. 19 to agreement states to the agency. The centers will be home to personnel now spread among three NRC offices. They will join an existing Center of Excellence on rulemaking within the NMSS Division on Rulemaking, which will be renamed the Division on Rulemaking, Environmental, and Financial Support.
“The reorganization has been in the works for several months,” NRC spokesman David McIntyre said by email Thursday. “It stems from the agency’s continuing effort to explore ways to fulfill our mission more efficiently and effectively, from Project Aim a few years ago to our current Transformation campaign.”
Staff at the industry regulator determined the reorganization “will lead to resource savings and anticipated efficiencies in workload distribution, collaboration, knowledge transfer, agility of critical skill sets, decision-making, and cross-office standardization,” the Sept. 19 letter says. That determination was laid out in a May 2019 commission paper on the office reorganization, which has not been made public.
However, the agency on Thursday said examples of increased efficiencies would include combining similar technical functions such as criticality review and structural engineering and sharing technical reviewers for licensing of nuclear fuel fabrication and certification of fuel transportation casks.
The specific budgets and headcounts for the merged NMSS divisions were not immediately available. McIntyre noted that NRC spending is based primarily by workload and business lines, rather than by organization.
As an example, all NRC nuclear materials and waste safety operations are funded at $131 million for the current fiscal 2019, with 515 full-time equivalent employees. But the agency’s latest budget does not break that down to the division level.
The Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards regulates a long list of nuclear operations, including: production of nuclear fuel; storage, transportation, and disposal of used fuel and high-level waste; and transportation of radioactive materials covered by the Atomic Energy Act. Its operations cover licensing, inspections, and regulatory enforcement, among other work.
The office currently has five divisions. The Division of Spent Fuel Management leads its regulatory work for management of that material, including licensing of interim used fuel and high-level waste storage facilities. The Division of Fuel Cycle Safety, Safeguards, and Environmental Review oversees safety of fuel cycle and special nuclear material facilities licensed under the 1954 Atomic Energy Act.
The NRC is currently reviewing license applications for two planned facilities for consolidated interim storage of used fuel from nuclear power plants: Holtec International’s proposed site in southeastern New Mexico and an Orano-Waste Control Specialists project in West Texas. It is also regulator for on-site storage of used fuel and active and retired power plants.
The NMSS reorganization will involve some shuffling of management within the office, according to the Sept. 19 letter.
Andrea Kock, currently director of the NMSS Division of Materials Safety, Security, State, and Tribal Programs, will take over as director of the Division of Fuel Management on Oct. 13. Her deputy will be Chris Regan, currently the deputy director for the NMSS Division of Spent Fuel Management.
Longtime NRC manager John Tappert as of Aug 12 has assumed leadership of the Division of Rulemaking, Environmental, and Financial Support, with Kevin Coyne joining him as deputy director on Oct. 13.
Further Part 61 Rulemaking Delay
During the meeting Wednesday, the NRC also indicated its timeline for completing the regulatory update on disposal of low-level radioactive waste has slid further to the right, though an agency official cautioned the latest schedule remains tentative.
The NRC presented a Sept. 18 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. The supplemental rule would be issued at the start of the comment period, McIntyre noted.
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.
There are four licensed commercial facilities for disposal of low-level radioactive waste: EnergySolutions sites in Clive, Utah, and Barnwell, S.C.; Waste Control Specialists (WCS) in Andrews County, Texas; and US Ecology on the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state. All four locations are in NRC agreement states, which assume much of the regulatory authority for radioactive materials within their borders.
EnergySolutions has been aggressive in trying to open its Clive operation for disposal of large amounts of depleted uranium. Waste Control Specialists also takes depleted uranium under its license from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ)
“The defense in depth that was built into our facility along with our performance assessment and the rigorous licensing and oversight by TCEQ will easily meet the requirements of the the draft rule and the discussions on the supplemental,” WCS President and Chief Operating Officer David Carlson said by email Friday. “Any operational impacts are expected to be minimal.”
