Executives with a major U.S. utility and the trade group for the nuclear industry last week said they were largely satisfied with the set of proposed regulations for power reactors making the transition from operations to decommissioning.
“Overall, we’re pretty pleased with the proposal as it came out. Our main goal obviously was just to codify … everything that required an exemption,” Pamela Cowan, Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) vice president for nuclear generation, said during a June 7 keynote address at the ExchangeMonitor’s Decommissioning Strategy Forum in Nashville.
Duke Energy sees some “positive movement forward” in the rulemaking, Associate General Counsel Tracey LeRoy said during a panel discussion at the conference.
The draft document, though, leaves out components that states and other stakeholders pushed for in the run-up to publication. That led Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) to call the proposed rule package “a nuclear industry wish list.”
After a process that began in 2015, staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in May issued proposed rules covering a number of areas of nuclear power operations, including emergency preparedness, physical security, cybersecurity, drug and alcohol testing, training requirements for certified fuel handlers, decommissioning trust funds, financial protection requirements and indemnity agreements, and application of the backfit rule. The intent is to relieve nuclear power licensees from certain operational requirements, or from costly license amendment or regulatory exemption filings, that become less necessary as decommissioning proceeds.
Among a host of updates to existing regulations, the proposal would apply a graded approach to emergency preparedness, physical security, cybersecurity, and off- and on-site insurance, with the federal directives becoming less stringent over time as site cleanup proceeds.
“At each step in that graded approach they are by rule defining the step down in requirements,” Rod McCullum, NEI’s senior director for fuel and decommissioning, said during a telephone interview Wednesday. “You had to seek exemptions from operating plant requirements previously. Now you automatically, for example, can do away with security measures you don’t need because they’re oriented toward protecting an operating reactor and you don’t have one.”
Plant licensees would also no longer automatically require an exemption to use their decommissioning trust funds for spent fuel management.
Cowan said the proposed rules would be less “burdensome” on retired power plants and provide more predictability during decommissioning. She said NEI had a voice with the NRC during the rulemaking process, advocating for regulations it believed should be incorporated into the proposal and objecting to provisions “that added costs with no benefit.”
Six nuclear power reactors have closed since 2012, and another 12 are already anticipated to shut down through 2025, according to NRC figures.
Duke Energy spent roughly $14 million on processing regulatory exemptions for its Crystal River Nuclear Plant in Florida, which suspended operations in 2009 and was formally retired in 2013. That covered engineering and financial analyses, development of the exemption requests, NRC fees for staff work, and in some cases keeping plant personnel to meet requirements under current rules until the exemption was approved, LeRoy said.
The plant has been placed in SAFSTOR mode, under which completion of active cleanup can be delayed for up to 60 years while radioactivity levels drop and the decommissioning trust funds are built up. Duke expects site restoration will be complete in 2074, with decommissioning costing $1.18 billion in 2013 dollars.
“Fourteen million dollars in the grand scheme of things, for what it costs to decommission a power plant, may not sound like a lot,” LeRoy said. “But these are real dollars and when you’re taking them out of your trust fund, and that’s a finite amount, every dollar counts.”
The five-person Nuclear Regulatory Commission is now considering the rulemaking proposal, and can approve the document or request revisions. Upon commission affirmation, the plan would be published in the Federal Register and opened for at least 75 days of public comment ahead of an anticipated vote on the final document in fall 2019.
The NRC this week also released draft versions of four regulatory guides covering decommissioning of nuclear power reactors, emergency planning for decommissioning of reactors, assuring availability of funds for decommissioning reactors, and standard format and content for post-shutdown decommissioning activities reports (PSDAR). The documents would assist nuclear power operators in complying with the new rules, should they go into effect, an agency spokesman said Wednesday.
McCullum said several proposals NEI opposed in written comments and appearances at public meetings did not end up in the final draft, notably the requirement that the NRC approve licensees’ PSDARs that lay out the decommissioning approach, along with shortening the maximum period a plant can remain in SAFSTOR.
In a joint letter submitted to the NRC in June 2017, the states of Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut called for elimination of SAFSTOR at single-reactor plans, which they said can hurt local communities’ economic development while they are left with contaminated properties while nuclear plant owners plump up their decommissioning trust funds before clearing the site.
“[T]he financial mechanism of SAFSTOR creates a significant risk that host states—and the NRC itself—may be left with a radiologically contaminated site,” the states said. “The NRC should not allow licensees to place public health and the environment at risk in this way.”
McCullum countered that market forces are increasingly addressing the issue of nuclear power plants that sit for decades after shutdown. Nuclear services companies such as NorthStar Group Services and EnergySolutions see opportunities to earn profits by taking responsibility (or even ownership) for utilities’ plants and then moving quickly into decommissioning.
NorthStar hopes to get state and federal regulatory approval to buy the retired Vermont Yankee plant, which it says it can decommission as early as 2026 — decades sooner than owner Entergy had previously scheduled.
Shortening the decommissioning timeline allowed under SAFSTOR would force plant owners to redo their cleanup funding calculations, reducing earnings as companies paid more into their funds, McCullum said.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, in its own comments to the NRC, said the PSDAR should have to go through an NRC approval process. Industry disagreed – McCullum said the agency should not rule on planning documents – and that potential rule was not included in the proposal.
McCullum said there are certain remaining issues NEI will raise during the public comment period ahead of completion of the rulemaking, but said he could not yet discuss specifics.
The NRDC said Thursday it could not yet comment on the rulemaking. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority indicated it has continued concerns about the document.
“The State remains concerned about the use of decommissioning trust funds, among other issues, for non-radiological decommissioning purposes, particularly at facilities with extensive sub-surface contamination. It seeks a robust role for host states like New York in the decommissioning of facilities within their borders,” an agency spokesman said Friday by email. “New York’s concerns also extend to the draft rule lessening oversight over decommissioning trust fund reporting, which will take place less frequently under the proposed rule. New York could bear the burden of handling cleanup costs in the event of an insolvent licensee with inadequate trust funds.”
Markey’s office this week did not respond to requests for additional detail on his criticism of the rulemaking. In a press release issued when the proposal was released, he called for a rule that addresses issues including the impact of climate change to nuclear power plant operations.
“The challenge of decommissioning Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in a safe and expeditious manner would only be greater because of this draft rule,” Markey stated at the time. Pilgrim, on Cape Cod, Mass., is scheduled to close in 2019.
