Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
10/24/2014
While litigation looms around the corner, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s final ruling on the Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel, formerly known as Waste Confidence, went into effect this week, 30 days after it was published in the Federal Register. The rule going into effect allows the Commission to make license renewal decisions that had to be put on hold, the first of which, Limerick Power Station, was approved for a 20 year license extension on Tuesday. The rule status also allows its opposition to officially bring litigation against the NRC in a federal court.
A group of 17 environmental activist groups has already threatened to bring the case to court if the NRC did not vacate its findings, and their lead attorney, Diane Curran, said this week that “there is a good chance” litigation is forthcoming. “We filed safety contentions with a number of groups in a coordinated effort in about 15 licensing cases,” Curran told RW Monitor this week. “That was one step— addressing the fact that NRC has not made the safety findings they need to make regarding disposal of spent fuel. We are considering a lawsuit in federal court to address some of the other problems with the rule. Some of the same problems that we filed in our comments, like assuming the existence of institutional controls over a long period of time and stating the purpose of the EIS is to comply with the court’s order. It was almost like an academic exercise, not a real part of reactor licensing.”
When the NRC first issued a revised waste confidence rule in 2010, the Commission extended the length of time assumed to be safe for storage of spent fuel at a reactor site from 30 to 60 years. In 2012, though, a federal court found the NRC’s rule deficient and mandated an updated version, along with an environmental impact statement. In response, the NRC based its draft revised rule on a generic environmental impact statement that found the environmental impact of storing spent fuel on-site was small in most categories. This final rulemaking, though, removed language concerning a timeline for the availability of a repository after the Commission determined that was outside the NRC’s regulation jurisdiction.
