Staff at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have determined that the Vermont state government is largely ready to assume regulatory authority over some radioactive materials.
The only significant issue was with certain state regulations that require revision, the agency said Tuesday in a Federal Register notice. Vermont has said it will address those issues.
In April, Gov. Phil Scott submitted the official request for Vermont to become the 39th agreement state to the NRC. If the application goes through, Vermont would become the regulator and licensor for certain radioactive byproduct, source, and special materials. That would cover 36 current licenses, which an NRC spokesman in April said covered industrial, medical, and academic facilities that possess equipment with radioactive materials.
The retired Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, now being decommissioned, would remain under federal oversight.
Vermont will manage its radioactive materials program through the already-established Office of Radiological Health within the state Department of Health. The count of trained and qualified staff in the office is adequate to the anticipated workload, the NRC said: 1.25 full-time equivalent personnel will be assigned directly to the radioactive materials program.
Vermont has established regulations compatible to NRC rules in areas including transportation of radioactive material, storage and disposal, record-keeping and incident reporting, and evaluation of license applications, the federal agency determined.
In a May 10 letter to the state, the NRC identified five areas in which Vermont regulations on radioactive materials were not compatible with the corresponding federal rules. For example: The state definition of sealed source did not exactly line up with the federal definition; and the state left out some definitions as it adopted the definitions laid out in federal regulations for land disposal of radioactive waste. In a June 6 letter to the NRC, the state committed to making the needed fixes.
The public has until July 25 to comment the proposed agreement. Comments can be submitted via www.regulations.gov, Docket ID NRC-2019-0114.
