The Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week released Pacific Gas and Electric’s Corp.’s (PG&E) 2,915-page license renewal application for the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in Avila Beach, Calif.
The utility had to apply for renewal before Dec. 31 for the commission to consider the application timely filed. In a press release Thursday, NRC said it is still reviewing whether the application is complete. If NRC deems the application timely filed, PG&E would be allowed to operate Diablo Canyon for as long as it takes the commission to review the application.
In 2022, California and the federal government gave PG&E a $2 billion bailout to keep Diablo Canyon open. The state reversed a 2018 law that would have required the plant to close in 2025.
Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) last week reintroduced his Strengthening American Nuclear Competitiveness Act. Z The bill runs 14 pages, much smaller than the 83-page ADVANCE Act bundled with the Senate’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act. The bills differ in scope and substance, but each attempts to make it easier for the nuclear industry to build new reactors in the U.S. and export nuclear technology abroad.
Johnson sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has thrown up a “wall” against the ADVANCE Act, according to Sen. Shelley Capito (W.Va.), the ADVANCE Act’s author. Capito this week urged a conference of nuclear professionals to lobby the House committee in support of her bill. The Senate on Thursday voted to send its members into a bicameral conference committee with the House to iron out the two chambers’ different version of the National Defense Appropriations Act.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it will publish the commission’s updated risk-appetite statement in September 2024.
“The Office of the Executive Director for Operations (OEDO) staff is working to develop the agency’s risk appetite statement. Upon completion, the staff will implement a process to periodically communicate a consistently understood agency risk appetite,” the NRC wrote in a regulatory filing published this week.
Work began to permanently secure some British low level nuclear waste in vaults, the United Kingdom’s state-owned Nuclear Waste Services said this week in a press release.
The low level waste repository near Drigg, Cumbria, on England’s western coast by the Irish Sea, has operated since 1959. Emplacement of waste in steel containers that are then sealed in vaults is newer.
Two workers who were contaminated in October by radioactive wastewater at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan are doing okay, according to a report from plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO).
“There are currently no health problems with either of the workers,” TEPCO wrote in the report published this week. The company cited Fukushima cleanup contractor Toshiba Energy Systems as the source of the information. Fukushima’s reactors melted down in 2011 after a tsunami caused by an offshore earthquake.
