In a final guidance published Monday, Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff took advice from EnergySolutions and gave reactor operators more leeway to prove they should be allowed to use decommissioning funds for equipment replacements.
However, operators will still be barred from tapping into the funds, which are supposed to be reserved for cleaning up nuclear power plants after they shut down, unless “extraordinary circumstances” require it, according to the final staff guidance, “Use of the Decommissioning Trust Fund During Operations for Major Radioactive Component Disposal.”
The final guidance goes into effect Sept. 4 and remains mostly unchanged compared with the draft NRC staff released a little more than a year ago. Companies are still largely prohibited from using decommissioning funds to replace major components, even though industry says this is decommissioning by another name, but NRC staff aimed to be less prescriptive about how companies get exemptions to that prohibition.
At the recommendation of EnergySolutions, the Salt Lake City-based waste-disposal and nuclear services company, NRC staff clarified that companies do not have to show that they face every single circumstance in a long, bulleted list that staff included with last year’s draft guidance.
“A licensee may be able to demonstrate extraordinary circumstances and thus justify an exemption based on the totality of the facts by addressing a subset of the issues listed in the [the guidance] or information not listed that may be beneficial to staff analysis,” NRC staff wrote in the final guidance published Monday.
That language, from a footnote on the fourth page of the 10-page guidance, was lifted from EnergySolutions’ August 2023 comments on the draft guidance.