Waste Control Specialists on Tuesday requested a temporary suspension of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission review of the company’s license application for a consolidated interim spent nuclear fuel storage site in West Texas. The Dallas-based waste management provider said the licensing process currently is an “unsupportable” financial burden as it seeks to wrap up its merger with rival EnergySolutions.
The Justice Department in November sued to prevent the $367 million sale of Waste Control Specialists from current owner Valhi to EnergySolutions parent Rockwell Holdco, arguing the deal would undermine competition and harm customers in the low-level radioactive waste disposal industry. The federal civil antitrust trial is scheduled to start next Monday and should end by May 5, WCS President and CEO Rod Baltzer said in a letter dated April 18 to the NRC.
The companies believe they will win their case and should complete the sale by the end of this summer, Baltzer stated. “WCS expects to go forward with this project at the earliest possible opportunity after completion of the sale,” he wrote. “However, due to the substantially increased application review and related costs, WCS must focus its limited financial resources on those expenditures necessary to safely run and maintain its currently licensed facilities, proceed through the trial set for April 24, and complete the sale to EnergySolutions.”
Waste Control Specialists in April 2016 filed its NRC license application for a new facility at its Andrews County, Texas, waste storage complex designed to hold up to 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel now marooned at nuclear power plants around the country. Pending approval from the regulator, WCS has said it intends to open the site in 2021.
The NRC has said its application evaluation would cost about $7.5 million, paying for staff time, “which is significantly higher than we originally estimated,” Baltzer wrote. Waste Control Specialists might also incur expenses related to public participation and a possible adjudicatory hearing before the NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, he added, emphasizing his company’s “significant operating losses” in recent years.
The company lost $26.2 million last year and $26.5 million in 2015, the San Antonio Express-News reported.
Baltzer told the NRC that a cost-sharing deal with one of Waste Control Specialists’ partners on the storage project has become depleted and the sides have not come to terms on an extension. The partners are NAC International and AREVA subsidiary TN Americas. Baltzer did not specify which company is involved in the cost-sharing situation; an AREVA spokesman said the company could not discuss the matter and NAC International did not respond to a request for comment.
The NRC has begun closing down its safety and environmental reviews of the license application, spokeswoman Maureen Conley said Wednesday: “As requested by WCS, the staff is taking the appropriate actions to properly suspend its review and contract support. Managers are working with the staff to close out their work to prepare for a future resumption, and to reassign them to other casework.”
Along with request that the NRC halt both review tracks for the license application, Baltzer also asked the NRC to suspend the process for requesting hearings on the proposal, as well as the deadlines for comments on the scope of the regulator’s environmental impact statement for the facility (which, at last public count, were at 16,000 and rising). When Waste Control Specialists requests the NRC resume its review of the license application, it anticipates the commission will schedule updated deadlines for hearings and comments, Baltzer said.
The current process of establishing the scope of the NRC’s environmental review will still wrap up as scheduled on April 28, Conley stated. The review overall was expected to be complete in the third quarter of fiscal 2019, with the first milestone – an initial request for additional information – anticipated this summer.
The schedule for resuming and completing the application evaluation at some point in the future would be based partially on availability of staff who have not been assigned to higher-priority work, Conley said.
Baltzer expressed no doubt that the license review would resume at some point, a position supported by at least one of Waste Control Specialists’ partners. “We’re pretty confident in continuing to support the project and it being a viable project,” said Curtis Roberts, a spokesman for AREVA, which would provide the NUHOMS horizontal dry storage containers that would hold the spent fuel at the WCS site.
A nuclear power critic, though, indicated he did not expect to see the project revived. “This latest radioactive waste Ponzi scheme has collapsed under its own weight,” Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste watchdog for Beyond Nuclear, said in a prepared statement. “In its request to NRC to suspend the proceedings, WCS acknowledged ‘enormous financial challenges.’ In other words, WCS’s financial assurances for the future, and financial status at present, are little more than a wobbly house of cards, that have now come crashing down.”
Waste Control Specialists had not responded by deadline to questions about its plans for spent fuel storage, including a timeline for resuming the license application and whether completion of the deal with EnergySolutions might lead management to rethink the proposal.
EnergySolutions has no comment on the situation, spokesman Mark Walker said Thursday.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is in the initial stage of its review of a license application filed on March 31 by Holtec International for a facility in southeastern New Mexico that would be capable of storing 120,000 metric tons of spent fuel. The agency’s acceptance review – in which it determines whether there is sufficient technical data for a full evaluation of the application – should take about 60 days, Conley said.
Roughly 75,000 metric tons of waste is now stored on site at U.S. nuclear plants, an amount growing by about 2,000 tons annually. The WCS and Holtec facilities would provide consolidated, interim storage of the spent fuel until the Department of Energy meets its congressional mandate to build a permanent resting place for U.S. defense and commercial nuclear waste.
