A Nuclear Regulatory Commission team tasked with reviewing the agency’s environmental justice efforts plans soon to submit its recommendations to the commissioners, a spokesperson said this week.
NRC’s environmental justice task force, spearheaded by head of the agency’s operating reactor licensing division, Gregory Suber, is “busy drafting its recommendations in a staff paper,” a spokesperson told RadWaste Monitor in an email Thursday. The team should send its findings to the commission in late March, the spokesperson said.
The review team is tasked with assessing whether NRC should expand its environmental justice efforts beyond what’s required by the National Environmental Policy Act, as recommended in a 2004 agency policy statement. The task force held a series of public meetings on its review during the latter half of 2021 and accepted stakeholder comments until Oct. 29.
During a Sep. 27 meeting, Suber said that the aim of his team’s review was to determine “what’s appropriate for an independent agency, like the NRC to adopt and determine how well we are incorporating that into our programs, policies and activities.”
The anti-nuclear group Nuclear Information and Resource Service said during that meeting that it hoped NRC would take “meaningful” action as a result of its review.
Environmental justice has emerged as a common theme across the Joe Biden administration’s energy and climate agendas. The White House in January established its Environmental Justice Advisory Council to “confron[t] longstanding environmental injustices and to ensur[e] that historically marginalized and polluted, overburdened communities have greater input on federal policies and decisions,” it said in a March press release.
The administration also created the Justice40 initiative, a program aimed at ensuring that 40% of the nation’s environmental improvements benefit underserved communities and those most impacted by the effects of climate change.
