A federal court heard oral arguments Monday concerning the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s handling of environmental assessment of continued waste storage at U.S. nuclear plants.
At question is whether NRC has given “a hard look” to the risks associated with spent fuel fires and spent fuel pool leaks in its continued storage rule, formerly known as the waste confidence rule. In 2012, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals found the rule to be deficient and asked for an updated version. The NRC was told to consider that the U.S. might never site a permanent repository for nuclear waste, which is the reason material has been accumulating at American power plants since the 1980s.
Arguing for the state of New York before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, attorney Andrew Amend claimed Monday that the “one-size-fits-all” generic impact statement (GEIS) that NRC included in the new rule can’t possibly be applied to plants such as Indian Point in New York, where environmentalists have raised concerns about the site’s impact on the Hudson River. He argued that New York’s dense population presents a unique set of circumstances, concerning evacuation and mitigation, that NRC’s GEIS doesn’t account for, which violates the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). He and his fellow petitioners requested that the court vacate the rule and remand it back to the commission for further changes.
NRC council Andrew Averbach said New York and the other petitioners, which include the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Nuclear Energy Institute, fail to recognize context in their argument. The GEIS spans more than 1,000 pages, he said, and represents the agency’s more than two-year effort to address the rule. More importantly, he argued, it doesn’t prevent NRC from considering all the concerns petitioners raised in license review and renewal. Furthermore, the GEIS thoroughly addressed issues over fires, leaks, and national repository failure, he said.
In response to the 2012 court ruling, NRC suspended issuing licenses and renewals until the new rule was implemented in 2014. The court will deliver an opinion on the case at a later date.
