Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
7/3/2014
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission appears to have taken on the responsibility to complete the Yucca Mountain supplemental Environmental Impact Statement needed to complete the Yucca licensing review, according to a letter NRC Chair Allison Macfarlane sent to members of Congress this week. The NRC originally requested that the Department of Energy complete the EIS, but DOE indicated it would only update the technical information for the NRC, avoiding doing the EIS itself. “The Commission has directed the staff to plan to develop and issue an EIS supplement,” Macfarlane said in her letter. “The work on the EIS supplement will not begin until at least the fall of 2014 when work on the SER is substantively complete and appropriate personnel are available to support the EIS supplement effort. At that time, staff will submit to the Commission its assessment of remaining Nuclear Waste Fund (NWF) funds and its proposed plan to complete the EIS supplement. The Commission will then provide direction on the allocation of funding to this task based on the staff’s updated assessment,” she said.
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, but in February, DOE argued that since it submitted a groundwater EIS in 2008, it did not have to update the EIS to fulfill its Nuclear Waste Policy Act legal obligations.
The Commission had originally allocated $625,000 for the EIS, but more will be needed with the added workload. The NRC has approximately $11 million in funds to support the license review, but a substantial amount of that money is being spent on the completion of the Yucca Safety Evaluation Reports, expected to be finished in January 2015. The NRC did not request additional funding in its Fiscal Year 2015 budget request, but House appropriators have included $55 million in their version of the FY15 Energy and Water Appropriations bill so that the NRC could continue its licensing efforts. Senate appropriators, though, did not include any additional funding for this effort in their version of the bill, instead focusing on the implementation of a pilot interim storage facility for the consolidation of high-level waste.
SERs on Track for January
Macfarlane also said in her letter that the SERs’ completion schedule remains on track for January 2015. “The majority of chapter milestones have been completed on time or ahead of due dates; any chapter that does not meet the projected schedule receives further management attention,” Macfarlane said in her letter. “Completion of the SER remains the staff’s highest priority for this project and on track for completion by January 2015.” According to Macfarlane, the NRC spent $870,541 in May on the SER completion, reaching an approximate total of $3.3 million spent on the project so far— within range of the estimated $8.3 million needed to complete them.
