The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is officially doing away with a proposed rulemaking that would govern spent fuel reprocessing, according to an agency notice published this week.
Declining industry interest in spent fuel reprocessing, higher priorities in spent fuel management and “budgetary constraints” were the main drivers in discontinuing the staff rulemaking activity that began in 2013, NRC wrote in a Federal Register notice Thursday.
The commission voted in June to approve NRC staff’s March 5 recommendation that the reprocessing probe end. In addition to waning interest from industry, agency staff also cited public concern about the safety of spent fuel reprocessing, which produces plutonium as a byproduct that can’t be used for power generation by most existing nuclear reactors.
Discussions about reprocessing crescendoed during the Donald Trump administration, when the Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy (ONE) promoted the potential benefits of the practice. ONE last year started up a new probe into spent fuel reprocessing, but an official involved with the program said at the time that it had “no clear outcome.”
Meanwhile, there’s currently no permanent or interim repository for the tons of spent nuclear fuel stranded at nuclear power plants across the country. The Joe Biden administration is sticking to its guns on the moribund Yucca Mountain geologic repository ⏤ its budget request for fiscal year 2022 doesn’t include funding to develop the site, which is the only one Congress has authorized to store spent fuel. The budget does, however, open the door to an inquiry into a federal interim storage facility, to the tune of around $20 million.
