The California Public Utilities Commission this week began eight days of evidentiary hearings on the request from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to close the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant within a decade.
The utility announced last June that it would not renew the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses for the plant’s two reactors when they expire in 2024 and 2025. PG&E said it wants to increase its use of other power sources that do not emit greenhouse gases.
The hearings ran from 10 a.m. 4 p.m. Wednesday through Friday of this week and will be on the same schedule Monday to Friday next week. They are being webcast here.
Testimony at the hearings is expected to inform the commission’s decision on the closure application.
Witnesses are expected from PG&E, San Luis Obispo County, the San Luis Coastal Unified School District, the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, Mothers for Peace, and other organizations, the San Luis Obispo Tribune reported.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has scheduled three days of meetings next month on the draft regulatory basis for its 2019 decommissioning rulemaking.
The meetings from May 8-10 at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md., follow the March publication of the draft document and the anticipated late-April release of the preliminary draft regulatory analysis for the rulemaking.
“Specifically, the objective of this meeting is to enhance external stakeholders’ understanding of these two documents to inform development of comment submissions,” according to the NRC notice posted Wednesday. “During this meeting, the NRC staff will provide presentations on the draft regulatory basis and the preliminary draft regulatory analysis. Members of the public are also encouraged to ask questions and provide feedback during this meeting. However, the NRC is not taking formal comments at this meeting.”
The NRC intends through its rulemaking to clarify and improve the process of decommissioning nuclear plants via amendments to current regulations, with an emphasis on reducing the need for exemptions from safety rules at plants that have shut down. The draft regulatory basis allows the regulator to move forward with developing regulations in specific areas concerning decommissioning, including trust funds that pay for the work.
Public comments are being accepted through June 13 at www.regulations.gov (Docket ID NRC-2015-0070).
The meeting is scheduled from 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. on May 8; 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. May 9; and 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; all at 11555 Rockville Pike. Topics to be discussed include current approaches to decommissioning, decommissioning trust funds, cybersecurity, and on-site and off-site insurance and indemnity agreements.
AREVA subsidiary TN Americas on Thursday announced it had secured a three-year contract for nuclear fuel storage operations at five U.S. atomic power facilities.
TN Americas workers will remove fuel assemblies from the plants’ spent fuel pools and place them in AREVA’s NUHOMS storage canisters, which will then be placed on NUHOMS horizontal dry storage modules at the sites, according to a press release.
The company did not cite the client, the value of the deal, or other information regarding the new contract.
TN Americas is the nuclear logistics branch of AREVA Nuclear Materials, the new U.S. subsidiary of the French multinational nuclear company.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said Wednesday it has sealed an agreement with two European educational institutions to develop educational and training material intended to assist in decommissioning of nuclear research reactors.
The tools and materials from the U.N. agency, the Slovak University of Technology, and the Technical University Vienna-Atominstitut (ATI) would be provided at no cost to IAEA member nations, according to the announcement.
“The IAEA has many ongoing activities to assist Member States in planning and operating research reactors, including their decommissioning,” Christophe Xerri, director of the IAEA’s Division of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology, said in the release. “The agreement we signed today will contribute to the development of appropriate tools for planning and cost estimation based on a well-established physical and radiological inventory of the materials that need to be managed. Planning well in advance for the comprehensive cost of decommissioning, including timeliness of the work and final waste disposal path, is a recommended good practice.”
ATI’s TRIGA research reactor in Vienna, Austria, will be the “reference facility” to show the value of the organizations’ decommissioning planning and expense model, the IAEA said.
Globally, roughly 300 research reactors and critical assemblies have undergone decommissioning to date, the IAEA said. Another 180 have ended operations, with about 50 of those being decommissioned. Meanwhile, there are 225 still-active research reactors, some of which have been operating for over four decades and will shut down in the near term.
From The Wires
From Gizmodo: The United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union could complicate the nation’s nuclear cleanup.
From The Orange County Register: The San Clemente, Calif., City Council will next month consider asking the California Coastal Commission to rescind its 2015 permit allowing for more nuclear waste from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station to be disposed of near the Pacific Ocean.
