The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is requesting $863.4 million in funding for the upcoming 2021 fiscal year, a small step up from the $855.6 million authorized by Congress for the current spending cycle.
But the agency noted Monday that amount would be 17% below its spending for fiscal 2014, just over $1 billion. In that time, the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) personnel will also have dropped by one-quarter, from 3,799.7 to 2,868.
After bulking up earlier in this century in anticipation of significant growth in the nuclear power industry, which never materialized, the industry regulator has been slimming down over much of the past decade.
“The NRC is well underway on what we refer to as our transformation journey. We’re not changing what we do well, which is our mission, we are however working toward our vision of becoming a modern, risk-informed regulator,” Dan Dorman, NRC deputy executive director for reactor and preparedness programs, said Monday during a conference call with reporters to discuss the agency budget.
That vision means focusing on the most important issues at the NRC; making use of available technologies; promoting innovation in NRC operations; and recruiting, developing, and maintaining a strong workforce over the coming 10 years, Dorman said.
Should Congress pass the spending plan as written, the NRC would actually end up with $32.2 million less than it has on hand now. The agency entered fiscal 2020 on Oct. 1 with a $40 million carryover that it does anticipate matching next year, according to its budget.
The Nuclear Reactor Safety segment would receive the lion’s share of the funding, $452.8 million, rising from the enacted $426.7 million. The division is divided into two line items: Operating Reactors and New Reactors, with the former taking home a projected $372.8 million.
The agency is not requesting any appropriation for its High-Level Waste line item within its Nuclear Materials and Waste Safety segment – the money that would be used for reviewing the Department of Energy’s license application for the nuclear waste repository under Yucca Mountain, Nev. After three unsuccessful attempts to persuade Congress to provide money to resume the licensing proceeding after a decade-long freeze, the Trump administration for 2021 is instead focusing on interim storage of radioactive waste.
That primarily involves a $27.5 million ask for the Interim Storage and Nuclear Waste Fund Oversight program at the Department of Energy.
“We will continue to use unobligated carryover funds appropriated from the Nuclear Waste Fund to address the remand by the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia Circuit in the case of Aiken County regarding the licensing process for the Yucca Mountain licensing,” Dorman told reporters.
The federal court in August 2013 ordered the NRC to resume processing the DOE license application, despite the Obama administration cutting off funding for the proceeding several years earlier. The agency has since spent nearly all of the $13.5 million carryover from the federal fund at the time of the ruling – it had just over $405,000 at the end of December, with monthly spending over the last year limited to a few hundred dollars for unspecified program planning and support. Further appropriations from Congress would be required for licensing.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission receives most of its funding from fees for its services for licensees and license applications. For fiscal 2021, it anticipates $740.4 million in fees and $123 million in congressional appropriations.
At the NRC, Nuclear Materials and Waste Safety would receive $125.6 million and 462 full-time equivalent staffers, if Congress approves the budget. That would be $5.4 million more in funding, largely due to “an increase in salaries and benefits to support enacted pay raises and increases in awards spending,” the agency said in its budget justification. However, the number of FTEs would drop by 19.
The program covers licensing and regulatory oversight of spent fuel storage, spent fuel transportation, decontamination and decommissioning of nuclear facilities, high-level and low-level radioactive waste, and other operations.
Within Nuclear Materials and Waste Safety, spending for Spent Fuel Storage and Transportation operations would spike from the enacted $22.9 million to $28.1 million. The number of FTEs would remain steady at 128.
Part of that spending boost would come from $700,000 to prepare for reviews of packages that would be used for transport of fresh accident-tolerant nuclear fuel and $900,000 to prepare the regulatory guidance and infrastructure for safety reviews of other fuel types.
The regulator does not anticipate an influx of resources in fiscal 2021 for its ongoing reviews of applications for two planned consolidated interim storage facilities for used nuclear fuel in Texas and New Mexico. The corporate teams behind those projects hope for rulings on the applications around mid-2021.
