The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is giving the state of South Carolina more time to submit new data and input on the license renewal of Westinghouse Electric’s Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility.
The formal 30-day comment period on the federal agency’s draft environmental assessment for the renewal application ended on Nov. 27, 2019. On Jan. 13, the NRC rejected a request from the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) to either extend the comment period through March or to suspend its proposed finding that renewing the license would generate no significant environmental impact.
However, the NRC will give the state agency alone until March 27 to file comments on the draft environmental assessment on the 40-year license renewal.
The state Department of Health and Environmental Control in November said it needed the additional time to incorporate data from testing of samples taken from 40 groundwater monitoring wells Westinghouse dug on its property last summer. The wells, required under a February 2019 consent agreement between the agency and Westinghouse, provide data on potential movement of contamination.
The state is also waiting on results of new testing on sediment from the Upper and Lower Sunset Lakes, where elevated levels of uranium concentrations have been preliminarily identified, according to a Nov. 26 letter to the NRC from G. Kendall Taylor, director of DHEC’s Site Assessment, Remediation, and Revitalization Division. Those concentrations could be the result of a 1971 lagoon failure at the plant that caused 1.5 million gallons of wastewater to pour into Upper Sunset Lake, DHEC said.
The state expects in February to receive a full report from Westinghouse on the well data, DHEC spokeswoman Laura Renwick said by email last week. She did not offer a schedule for Westinghouse to submit findings from its sediment testing.
“During a briefing, Westinghouse stated no additional detections of uranium were found in the November sampling sediments in Mill Creek,” Renwick wrote.
The state agency has not yet taken a position on license renewal, she stated.
Westinghouse has since 1969 been manufacturing nuclear fuel for power plants at the facility in Hopkins, S.C. The company in 2014 applied for a 40-year license renewal for the 550,000-square-foot plant. The current operations license expires on Sept. 30, 2027.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission initially issued its environmental assessment and finding of no significant impact in June 2018. It subsequently revoked those following a series of mishaps at the facility, but affirmed its earlier findings in a new draft environmental assessment in October.
“The final environmental assessment for the license renewal will not be completed until a review of the additional data is finished, so the FONSI (or other finding) will not be issued until the EA is finalized,” NRC spokesman Roger Hannah said by email on Jan. 22.
The NRC had anticipated completing the environmental review by April, but that will be slowed by several months due to the additional data, Hannah said. A new schedule for completion and a final review on license renewal is not known.
