Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
4/17/2015
A group of Senators, including Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Ranking Member Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), reintroduced three pieces of legislation this week that would enhance and expand safety and security regulations for reactor sites undergoing decommissioning and for the storage of spent nuclear fuel at operating nuclear plants. The Senators, who each have commercial reactors in their states, introduced the bills last session, but they did not see any movement. Two of the three bills, the Safe and Secure Decommissioning Act of 2015 and the Nuclear Plant Decommissioning Act of 2015, deal with increasing safety at the decommissioning site while increasing local stakeholder involvement in the decommissioning planning process. “In my home state of California, the San Onofre nuclear plant closed permanently,” Boxer said in statement. “Our legislation will ensure that the San Onofre facility and others like it across the nation are safely decommissioned and that the surrounding communities are protected.”
The third bill, the Dry Cask Storage Act of 2015, calls for the removal of spent fuel from pools to dry cask storage as soon as the fuel is ready. The reactors would have to gain Nuclear Regulatory Commission-approval for a plan that would require the safe removal of spent nuclear fuel from the wet pools and placement of that spent fuel into dry cask storage within seven years of the time the plan is submitted to the NRC. “An accident at an overstuffed spent fuel pool like the one at Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Massachusetts would be as disastrous as an accident at an operating nuclear reactor,” Markey said in a statement. “Pilgrim’s spent fuel pool contains nearly four times more radioactive waste than it was originally designed to hold. We need to ensure dangerous nuclear waste is moved to safer storage before a nuclear disaster occurs.”
NRC: Expedited Removal Only Has Marginal Safety Benefits
The NRC determined last year that the expedited movement of spent fuel to dry cask storage would only provide a marginal safety increase. Following a staff analysis, the Commission voted that the current practice of storing spent fuel in wet pools adequately protected public safety. The issue was originally considered as part of its lessons learned from the Fukushima-Daiichi disaster, but the Commission said the cost of transfer greatly outweighed the marginal safety enhancement added. The bill includes funding to help utilities implement the transfer.
The NRC also initiated earlier this year a rulemaking to address the decommissioning process. Currently, the NRC does not have regulations that reflect the decreased security and safety threat posed by a reactor undergoing decommissioning. Instead, a series of license amendments is needed to exempt the plants, a step that can prove costly and timely for both utilities and the NRC. According to the Commission’s staff requirements memoranda, the staff should focus on a wide variety of issues in its rulemaking that affect decommissioning plants, including the appropriate amount of NRC involvement in the Post Shutdown Decommissioning Activity Report, as well as the role of state and local government in the process, among other things.
