Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Kristine Svinicki suggested Tuesday that NRC staff consider expediting parts of its decommissioning rulemaking, so that the new rules can be applied to any nuclear power plants that announce premature shutdowns in the next two years.
The rulemaking is in an effort to improve nuclear plant decommissioning regulations, with a particular focus on reducing the need for exemptions to safety regulations for closed facilities. The rule is expected to be completed by 2019.
Svinicki said she worries NRC will end up in the same situation is was in in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when she said staff assumed no additional reactors would prematurely shut down. That has not been the case, she noted, saying that if the rulemaking is not expedited certain plants won’t benefit from the effort. She said there’s a “medium probability” that some facilities will announce premature shutdown in the next 18 to 24 months.
“Do you think that you would at least be open to evaluating an opportunity to bifurcate some of the near-term things in an expedited rulemaking and then take the broader issues in a kind of parallel but maybe segregated rulemaking?” Svinicki asked NRC staff during a briefing on the rulemaking at agency headquarters in Rockville, Md.
Michael Johnson, deputy executive director for reactor and preparedness programs, answered that staff can be flexible.
“If there was to come a time when the commission would say let’s bifurcate if you will, let’s go to a narrower-scope rule to enable the staff to move forward in a way that doesn’t impact and then to come back at another time, we could accommodate that,” Johnson said. “If the commission would elect to go with the rule as broadly scoped as you could imagine, we would prioritize our resources to deal with those that we are working through and we would come back to the commission if we needed additional resources.”
