Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
3/14/2014
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is still considering its options on how to move forward with the supplemental environmental impact statement required for the Yucca Mountain licensing review after the Department of Energy recently said it would not complete it, NRC Chair Allison Macfarlane said this week. “We’re still considering what our options are,” Macfarlane said during a press conference at the NRC Regulatory Information Conference. “We’ve just heard about this from the DOE, and we will get back to you on that.”
DOE is arguing that since it submitted a groundwater EIS in 2008, it does not have to update the EIS to fulfill its Nuclear Waste Policy Act legal obligations. The NRC issued an Order in November setting forth a pathway to re-start the Yucca Mountain licensing review, including the request for a supplemental EIS from DOE on groundwater issues to satisfy requirements set forth in the National Environmental Policy Act. DOE had initially planned to move forward with the NRC’s request for the study, and Assistant Energy Secretary for Nuclear Energy Peter Lyons told House lawmakers in January that the Department had taken steps to prepare the EIS.
Waste Confidence on Track, Challenges Ahead
The Yucca Mountain licensing review, though, was not the only controversial topic to receive a status update by a Commissioner during the conference. Commissioner William Magwood talked about the status of the Waste Confidence update the Commission is working on, and said he anticipates more legal challenges to ‘whatever we come up with.’ “We are on track for this fall that that process for Waste Confidence should be over,” Magwood said, “We have received all the comments, and we’ll be in a position to move forward with the licensing activities that were suspended while Waste Confidence was sorted out. I don’t think the completion will be the end of this story. I suspect we will see more challenges to whatever we come up with, but I’m confident the staff has done a very solid job. Our legal staff has looked very closely at it, and I think we are on a good path to bring this to a resolution for this fall,” he said.
The NRC’s proposed waste confidence ruling, released in June, found that spent fuel can be stored on site for 60 years past a reactor’s licensed life. 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. Last year, though, a federal court found the NRC’s rule deficient and mandated an updated version, along with an environmental impact statement. The public comment period lasted for 98 days, ending on Dec. 20, 2013. The NRC received more than 33,000 written comments along with comments made at 13 public meetings, and it should have a final ruling by Oct. 3, the NRC said.
Communication with Stakeholders
Also at the conference, the theme of open communication and transparency dominated much of the plenary speeches given by the Commissioners. Especially in the context of Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, which occurred three years ago this week, the Commissioners stressed the need to keep the public informed so as to avoid the spread of misinformation. “At the same time, I think we must acknowledge that public confidence in nuclear safety was shaken in the days following Fukushima, and that understanding the public’s concerns and addressing them will play a crucial role in keeping our reactors safe and building public confidence in nuclear technology and in state regulatory bodies,” Macfarlane said during her speech. “In their best moments human beings seek out information about dangerous situations in order to anticipate and prevent future ones. And as we struggle to make sense of what’s happened, we may wind up relying on less than reliable sources simply because they’re the only ones available or because they’re the closest at hand. The adage that “nature abhors a vacuum” bears noting here. An absence of good, reliable information can leave the door open for inaccurate, speculative, or worse, deliberately misleading information,” she said.
Commissioner William Ostendorff echoed the need for open communication with the public in his speech. He applauded the NRC’s outreach efforts. “Based on my experience working in and with other agencies and departments in the federal government, the NRC is by far the most transparent of all those places,” Ostendorff said. “I think that our transparency is truly a hallmark of this agency. We hold over a thousand public meetings a year; made more than 100,000 documents public in 2013 alone; and are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to communicate with our stakeholders.”
SAFESTOR vs. Rapid Decommissioning?
While Macfarlane and Ostendorff talked about communication, Commissioner Kristin Svinicki received a question during her session concerning the moral responsibility of providing expeditious decommissioning compared to 60 years, as is allowed under the NRC’s SAFESTOR regulations. “Our regulations right now are structured to leave the choice amongst the regulatory options up to the operators of the plants and those who will be completing the decommissioning,” Svinicki said. “I think I would add very generally that I am not aware of any flaws of the current regulatory construct. I have tried in my time as a commissioner to visit a number of shutdown sites, some of which have been shutdown for a very long time, and are well into the decommissioning process, as well as those that are in a more active decommissioning phase like at Zion. I have tried to expose myself to the full pathways of the approaches, and I think it’s something driven by the situation,” she said.
