The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday urged a federal appeals court to dismiss an anti-nuclear advocacy group’s motion demanding the agency rule on the legality of two license applications for interim storage of spent nuclear power reactor fuel.
Beyond Nuclear filed its petition for review in December with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. It argued the commission should have ruled on its motion to dismiss the licensing proceedings rather than kicking the question to the NRC’s quasi-judicial Atomic Safety and Licensing Board.
The same three-person board is considering petitions by Beyond Nuclear and other groups to intervene in the license applications for Holtec International’s planned used fuel storage facility in Lea County, N.M., and an Orano-Waste Control Specialists project in Andrews County, Texas.
The NRC reaffirmed Monday that those proceedings are the appropriate place to consider Beyond Nuclear’s core case against the license applications: That allowing temporary storage would be illegal because the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires the Department of Energy to assume ownership of the used fuel for transport to storage from nuclear power plants, but only when a permanent repository is available.
The Energy Department in 2008 submitted a license application for a disposal facility under Yucca Mountain, Nev., to the NRC. The Obama administration defunded the process two years later, and the Trump administration has yet to persuade Congress to appropriate money to restart the process.
While the 1946 Hobbs Act allows the court to rule on “final orders” from the NRC, the decision Beyond Nuclear opposes does not constitute a final order, according to Monday’s filing. The “legal arguments that Beyond Nuclear has raised challenging the Commission’s authority to issue the underlying licenses have been channeled into the agency’s adjudicatory process, the Board is considering them, and the Commission itself will have the opportunity to consider them at a later date in the event of an appeal.”
Related to that, the Beyond Nuclear petition to the court is not ripe given that the legality question will be considered by both the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board and potentially the commission on appeal, the NRC said.
The commonwealth of Massachusetts this week forcefully pushed back against the suggestion that it not be given party status in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission review of the license transfer application for the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station.
Power company Entergy is scheduled to close Pilgrim by May 31, then hopes this year to sell the single-reactor plant on Cape Cod to energy technology company Holtec International for decommissioning, site restoration, and spent fuel management. First, the NRC would have to sign off on the companies’ November 2018 applications for transfer of Pilgrim’s operations and spent fuel storage licenses.
Both the commonwealth of Massachusetts and the advocacy group Pilgrim Watch in February filed petitions for a hearing and intervention in the license proceeding. They cited similar contentions that would be raised: Entergy and Holtec have not met the legal requirement of proving the plant’s decommissioning trust can cover all work, and the companies did not conduct needed environmental evaluations for the license transfer.
Last month, Pilgrim’s owner and prospective buyer said both petitions should be rejected – arguing Massachusetts did not submit any admissible contentions against the license transfer and Pilgrim Watch has neither standing nor admissible contentions.
“The Applicants … oppose the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ Petition to Intervene and for a Hearing on the Proposed Action based on a simple yet wholly misguided premise: trust us,” attorneys for the state wrote in the response filed with the NRC on Monday.
Holtec says it can effectively complete decommissioning by 2026. The trust fund now holds more than $1 billion, and would have more than $200 million left when only spent fuel management is left to perform, according to Entergy and Holtec.
Attorneys for Massachusetts countered Monday it would be wrong to simply trust that Pilgrim’s decommissioning fund is assured of covering all costs; that Holtec, in its first job managing cleanup at a nuclear power plant, can complete the project “at a pace never previously achieved”; and that whatever remains of the trust after decommissioning is complete will be sufficient to pay for decades of on-site spent fuel management, according to Massachusetts.
Pilgrim Watch also urged the NRC to sign off on its petition for intervention. It noted that an agency Atomic Safety and Licensing Board had approved the watchdog to intervene in the prior relicensing for the power plant, without opposition from Entergy.
“Entergy has changed its position on whether Pilgrim has standing; but the facts supporting Pilgrim Watch’s standing have not. The Board’s previous conclusion that Pilgrim Watch has standing should not change either,” the group said in its own response Monday.
The NRC is still considering the petitions for intervention, a spokesperson said Tuesday.
A court in the United Kingdom on Tuesday fined the government-owned entity that operates the Sellafield nuclear site £380,000 ($500,742) for a 2017 incident in which an employee was exposed to plutonium.
Sellafield Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, pleaded guilty to violating the nation’s 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act. Along with the fine, the Carlisle Crown Court ordered the company to pay £96,753.22 ($127,475.91) in court costs, according to a press release from the government’s Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR).
The ONR filed the case relating to a Feb. 5, 2017, incident in which a Sellafield employee suffered a puncture wound on one hand while using a radioactive materials processing glove box. The worker took in roughly eight times as much plutonium as allowed in one year for nuclear personnel, the press release says.
The Office for Nuclear Regulation said its investigation of the incident determined that the employee had adhered to the company’s procedures as he cleaned a part of an alarm system. However, the corroded and sharpened probe punctured his skin through a protective glove.
“This was a case where Sellafield Limited failed to properly assess the risk to workers arising from sharp objects when working in a glovebox,” ONR Superintending Inspector Paul Smith said in the release. “The accident could have been avoided had the corroded probe been routinely replaced – a change that was put in place by the company immediately after the event.”
As its nuclear reprocessing mission ends, the West Cumbria complex is now focused almost entirely on cleanup of the legacy of plutonium production for nuclear weapons and power.
From The Wires
From the St. Louis Record: Class-action lawsuit on radioactive waste will remain in state court.
