Happy Friday, nuke-watchers. With the Decommissioning Strategy Forum a wrap, here are some updates from the civilian nuclear power world that RadWaste Monitor was tracking this week from our conference hub outside of Las Vegas:
Industry Holding on for a Hero in Congress for Spent Fuel Solutions
SUMMERLIN, NEV. — The nuclear industry needs someone to lead the charge on Capitol Hill for a spent nuclear fuel storage solution, speakers at the annual Decommissioning Strategy Forum said here this week.
“I think that there could be an opportunity to work together as utilities to identify somebody [in Congress] who could be a champion for this issue,” said Manuel Camargo, Southern California Edison’s (SCE) strategic planner for decommissioning San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) during a panel Tuesday at the event organized by Exchange Monitor.
SCE’s federal special interest group, Action for Spent Fuel Solutions Now, has worked closely with Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) on the spent fuel issue, Camargo said. Levin, alongside Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), introduced in September a new bill that would establish a mostly non-federal task force charged with defining consent-based siting of nuclear waste storage and determining whether such waste can be regulated by states.
But, Levin and Markey can’t solve the spent fuel impasse alone, Camargo said Tuesday. “We need additional help in Congress,” he said.
Once upon a time, Congress had a nuclear waste champion in Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), Yankee Atomic Power Company’s director of public and government affairs Eric Howes said Tuesday.
“[Shimkus] had been keeping this issue very much up on the radar screen,” Howes said. “Whether you agreed with everything that he had to say or not, he was passionate about it. And we don’t really have anybody that’s taking up that mantle,” he said.
Shimkus himself told RadWaste Monitor in August that he was well known on the Hill as the subject matter expert on nuclear waste. Near the end of his 24-year career representing Illinois’s 15th congressional district, Shimkus sponsored his moonshot Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2018. Although the 51-page bill died in the Senate, it was the closest any politician has come in recent history to changing the nation’s nuclear waste law.
“I guess our hope is that another champion will emerge in Congress to promote this issue with the same passion that Chairman Shimkus did,” Howes said Tuesday.
Exelon CEO Lobbies for Biden Infrastructure Bill
“The time to act is now,” the head of a major utility company told the Joe Biden administration and members of Congress in a statement this week.
“The bipartisan infrastructure agreement and the policy framework for Build Back Better legislation will make us more competitive globally, spur innovation and support good-paying jobs, protect current and future generations from the worst impacts of climate change and cement America’s leadership on one of the most pressing challenges – and opportunities – of our time,” said Exelon president and CEO Chris Crane in a press release published Monday.
Crane encouraged lawmakers to pass the federal spending plan and bipartisan infrastructure bill.
The Biden admin’s infrastructure plan includes around $6 billion in tax credits for nuclear power plants to be auctioned off by the Department of Energy. Exelon currently owns and operates 12 nuclear plants in four states including Illinois’s financially-troubled Byron and Dresden plants, which got an eleventh-hour bailout from the state government in September.
The infrastructure plan has yet to get a vote in Congress, where it is subject to fierce intra-party debate among Democrats.
NRC Still Batting Away Requests for Permanent Inspector at Indian Point
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission told another set of New York politicians last week that there was no need for a resident inspector at the recently-shuttered Indian Point Energy Center.
“After careful consideration, the NRC staff has determined that maintaining full-time resident inspectors at Indian Point during decommissioning is not necessary to provide for the protection of the public health and safety, nor is a resident inspector necessarily the best method for effective regulatory oversight at the site,” the agency told New York state Assemblywoman Sandy Galef (D-District 95) and state Senator Pete Harckham (D-District 40) in two separate letters dated Oct. 27.
A full-time inspector at the Buchanan, N.Y. nuclear plant, currently being decommissioned by Holtec International, isn’t necessary because “decommissioning activities present significantly fewer radiological and nuclear safety hazards” than an operating reactor, the letter said. Visiting inspectors from NRC’s Region 1 office in Pennsylvania have the expertise needed to oversee decommissioning adequately, the agency said.
Galef and Harckham aren’t the first Empire State politicians to request a permanent NRC presence at Indian Point. These new letters from the commission are much the same as one sent to George Latimer, executive of Westchester County, N.Y., in September. Latimer told NRC at the time that a resident inspector would “best ensure the safety and efficacy of Indian Point’s decommissioning process.”
Meanwhile, decommissioning is moving along at Indian Point, which Holtec took over from Entergy after the plant’s Unit 3 reactor shut down for good April 30. As of September, the company had moved a little under half of the plant’s spent fuel to dry storage. Holtec has said that that process should be done by 2023 or so.
Richmond Confirmed as Undersecretary of Science, DOE Announces
The Senate on Thursday confirmed Geraldine Richmond as head of the Department of Energy’s science office.
In her new post, Richmond will oversee DOE’s research-oriented efforts in the energy sector. After her swearing in, the agency’s Office of Nuclear Energy wil report up to Richmond.
Richmond’s appointment will “elevate [DOE’s] efforts to transition to a clean energy economy, accelerate scientific innovation, and build our country back better,” said energy secretary Jennifer Granholm in a statement Thursday.
Richmond is currently a chemistry professor and chair of the science department at the University of Oregon. She was appointed to the National Science Board by the Barack Obama administration in 2012, where she still serves today. Richmond was also the U.S. science envoy to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma and Thailand from 2015 to 2016, and was chair of DOE’s Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee from 1998 to 2003.
Richmond has a B.S. in chemistry from Kansas State University and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.
NRC Appoints Higgs as Agency Investigations Chief
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has tapped its investigations office’s acting director to lead the division full-time, according to a press release published this week.
Tracy Higgs, who has been acting director of NRC’s Office of Investigations since January, will officially head up the office effective Nov. 7, according to an agency press release dated Thursday. Higgs replaces Edward “Andy” Shuttleworth, who retired in January.
Prior to becoming acting director, Higgs had served as an operations officer in the investigations office since 2017, the press release said. Before joining NRC, she held senior leadership roles in the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), including as a National Security Directorate senior representative to the Department of the Navy Naval Reactors Senior Flag and Executive leadership.
Higgs holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Information Systems from St. Thomas University and a master’s degree in Public Administration from Florida International University. She also holds a Doctor of Business Administration degree from Northcentral University.
NRC’s investigations office “develops policy, procedures and standards for conducting all NRC investigations of alleged wrongdoing by licensees and other entities,” Thursday’s press release said. The department oversees all investigations within the scope of agency authority, except those of NRC employees and contractors.
Manchin Asks Experts Whether WV Should Go Nuclear
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) wants to know if his home state of West Virginia should look to nuclear power for its energy future.
“West Virginia’s energy production is about 96% coal, [which is required] for the electricity needs in my state,” Manchin said during a Senate Energy and Natural Resources hearing Thursday. “Do you believe the best direction for the state of West Virginia to go would be, as we transition, to nuclear?”
American Electric Power’s vice president of generation Paul Chodak III told Manchin that West Virginia has “an outstanding opportunity” to implement small modular reactor (SMR) technology.
“[F]ossil generation with carbon capture storage and nuclear are the only two emissions-free, dispatchable sources that we really have that can go multi-days or even seasonal,” Chodak said. “And when you look at West Virginia, its geology is wonderful to look at but, in terms of storing CO2, not so good.”
Shannon Bragg-Sitton, director for integrated energy and storage systems at Idaho National Laboratory, said that the Mountain State’s existing coal plant infrastructure could make it easier and cheaper to replace coal-fired power plants with nuclear reactors. “We can take advantage of the grid interconnection,” she said.
Manchin has been a vocal proponent of nuclear power in recent months, throwing his support behind a $6 billion nuclear production tax credit proposed as part of the Joe Biden administration’s infrastructure bill. The senator penned a letter to Biden in April urging him to take action to prevent the nation’s existing nuclear fleet from shutting down.
