The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is seeking input on the draft regulatory analysis that will lay out updated cost and benefit figures for its revised Part 61 rule on low-level radioactive waste storage.
The draft analysis was issued in September 2016 alongside NRC staff’s proposed final rule package. The commission itself last month directed a set of “substantive revisions” to the rulemaking that would be written into a supplemental proposed Part 61 update.
The 35-year-old section of the Code of Federal Regulations establishes procedures, criteria, and terms and conditions for licensing long-term near-surface and above-ground storage of low-level radioactive waste, which is now only provided at four sites around the country. The revision process is intended to address the impacts from storage of depleted uranium and other waste streams that were not directly addressed in the original rule.
Toward that, the draft rule establishes a number of requirements, including development of site-specific waste acceptance criteria and technical analyses for compliance with public radiation dose limits. It also would set a compliance period of 1,000 years, or 10,000 years for sites with significant amounts of long-lived radionuclides.
The draft analysis estimated that licensees on average would incur a $1.13 million “undiscounted” implementation expense and a $1.33 million ongoing operations expense, over the regulatory analysis term, based on the rule. The total cost to the licensees was projected at $4.5 million for implementation and $5.3 million for operations.
Three companies operate the four LLRW disposal facilities: EnergySolutions, in Clive, Utah, and Barnwell, S.C.; Waste Control Specialists, in Andrews County, Texas; and US Ecology, at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state.
Those four states are all NRC “agreement states,” which assume some authority from the agency to license and regulate byproduct materials. The average undiscounted cost to the agreement states from implementing the original draft rule was projected at $740,000, with a continuing expense of $1 million during the regulatory analysis period. The total undiscounted cost was estimated at $2.9 million, with an ongoing $4 million expense.
Following a comment period on the staff’s draft Part 61 rule, the commission dictated five distinct changes that could impact the figures in the analysis. Among the mandates: Commissioners directed staff to reinstate a “case by case basis,” essentially grandfathering, to enact the new requirements only on sites that would dispose of large amounts of depleted uranium; and to limit the compliance period to 1,000 years.
“One of the factors the commission wanted us to do as part of that supplemental rule was to revise the rulemaking to be informed by broader and more fully integrated, but reasonably foreseeable costs and benefits to the U.S. waste disposal system resulting from the proposed rule changes, including pass-through costs to waste generators and processors,” Gary Comfort, senior project manager in charge of the rulemaking, said Thursday during a public meeting at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md., on the process.
Staff is seeking input on seven questions, including: whether the agency is studying “appropriate alternatives for the regulatory action described in the draft regulatory analysis”; whether the NRC is correct to assume that just two LLRW disposal sites, EnergySolutions’ Clive facility and WCS in Texas, would take in large quantities of depleted uranium; and what new expenses or cost savings could be created for society, industry, and government from the supplemental proposed rulemaking.
A number of speakers addressed staff during Thursday’s meeting, but the event was not part of the official record.
Comments are due by Nov. 16, and can be submitted at regulations.gov, Docket ID NRC-2011-0012; by email to [email protected]; by fax, to Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, at 301-415-1101; or by mail, to Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555-0001.
No comments had been submitted as of Friday.
The supplemental Part 61 rule encompassing the commission’s directives is expected to be issued in spring 2018, Comfort said. That would be followed by a separate NRC notice and comment period on the rule itself.
