Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff is recommending allowing nuclear plant operators to spend money from their decommissioning trust funds on certain separate expenses without having to obtain authorization from the federal agency.
The recommendation, if enacted by the NRC as part of a larger rulemaking, would still require that nuclear utilities ensure their accounts maintain a sufficient amount of funding to cover all expenses for decommissioning.
“So long as that end number is positive, then staff would see no reason not to let the licensee use those funds without requiring a regulatory exemption,” Michael Dusaniwskyj, a financial analyst with the agency’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, said during a presentation Tuesday at a three-day public meeting on the NRC’s 2019 decommissioning rulemaking.
The rulemaking is intended to clarify and improve the decommissioning process, with an emphasis on reducing the need for regulatory exemptions on select operational matters for shuttered and defueled reactors that pose a reduced danger to public safety and security.
The NRC in March issued a draft regulatory basis in which staff cited areas of decommissioning that were primed for rulemaking, including decommissioning trust funds, emergency preparedness, and physical security; those that need further public input before recommendations can be completed, including cybersecurity, fitness for duty, and aging management; and matters where regulatory guidance would suffice, including decommissioning time frames and the roles of state and local governments and other stakeholders.
Staff’s preliminary draft regulatory analysis for the rulemaking, released on Monday, provides alternatives and cost and benefit analyses for many of those matters.
Nuclear plant operators today must store their spent reactor fuel on-site while they wait for the Department of Energy to meet its 1982 congressional mandate to take that waste off their hands and put it in a permanent repository. When that eventually does happen, the companies will also have to pay to decommission their spent fuel storage pads.
Utilities have looked to their trust funds to pay for spent fuel management expenses, which requires an official exemption from the NRC and can raise the ire of local and state governments that worry about underfunding for decommissioning of nearby nuclear plants. The state of Vermont, for example, continues to contest the NRC trust-fund exemption for Entergy’s Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station.
The number of exemptions to date covers just four nuclear plants, but that could change as additional reactors shift into decommissioning. Twenty power reactors are currently in some mode of decommissioning, and another seven are expected to end operations by 2024, according to the NRC.
Existing regulations, meanwhile, do not provide guidance on commingling of decommissioning and spent fuel management funds, and the regulator has no means other than exemptions for authorizing use of such money for operations beyond decommissioning, the draft regulatory analysis says.
“The reliance on exemptions creates regulatory uncertainties as well as burdens on the licensees and the NRC,” the document states. “A licensee must expend resources to prepare the documentation and analysis that is required to obtain approval of the exemption request. The NRC staff must also divert resources from other agency activities to evaluate each request in order to determine whether the exemption request should be granted.
NRC staff recommended a three-part alternative to address the situation:
- Update existing regulations so decommissioning trust funds can be used for radiological decommissioning of nuclear plants, spent fuel management, and spent fuel storage pad decommissioning, as long as the licensee delineates the costs within the trust fund and that sufficient money is available to pay for its primary purpose.
- Update reporting mandates for decommissioning trust funds to bring them in line with corresponding reporting requirements for spent fuel storage sites and “to remove unnecessary reporting burdens.” The NRC would then require formal status reports on decommissioning funding every three years rather than biannually.
- Authorize spending of 1 percent of the projected total of a trust fund at NRC license termination for miscellaneous costs indirectly connected to decommissioning.
In his presentation, Dusaniwskyj noted that staff hopes to change regulations so that any trust fund shortfall identified in a licensee report be required to be “immediately fixed. Right now, under guidance, licensees have up to two years to correct any potential problems due to the funding of the trust fund itself.”
The other trust-fund rules options cited in the report were no action and a version of the recommended alternative in which licensees would be required to submit site-specific decommissioning plans and to fund the decommissioning account by the larger of two means: a site-specific cost estimate or the NRC’s current table of minimum amounts formula.
The staff recommendations across various decommissioning segments come with projected expenses and savings, sometimes in the millions or tens of millions of dollars.
The recommended trust fund option is projected to save industry anywhere from $435,000 to $1.9 million because they would not have to apply for exemptions, though this would not apply to Vermont Yankee and a number of other plants that are already in decommissioning or are expected to reach that status before 2019.
NRC staff projects the agency would save $217,000 to $951,000 through the recommended alternative and no longer having to process exemption requests once the decommissioning rulemaking is completed. However, the cost to implement the new system is forecast at $672,000 to $742,000.
Total net result to the NRC for updating the trust fund system is projected to range from a $384,000 cost to a $391,000 gain. Industry, meanwhile would stand to gain anywhere from $507,000 to $2.1 million.
Both the preliminary draft regulatory analysis and draft regulatory basis are subject to change while being finalized.
The NRC is accepting public comments for the analysis through June 13, at www.regulations.gov, Docket ID NRC-2015-0070.
Stakeholders also have 90 days from March 10 to provide input on the final regulatory basis for decommissioning, which is due for release toward the end of this year. That document will help NRC staff prepare a proposed rule for the commission by next spring, with the draft final rule anticipated in fall 2019.
