Reactor Licensing & Regulation

Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Gregory Jaczko sought to assure lawmakers yesterday that, despite recent public disagreements between Commissioners, the work environment of his agency has improved since his professional behavior was called into question before Congress in December. “The only thing the NRC has going for it is credibility. Under your leadership that credibility has been […]

Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko yesterday made clear that he does not consider low-level radioactive waste issues, including work on updating the 10 CFR Part 61 waste classification tables, to be a particularly pressing matter. The anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant, and what the U.S. is doing to develop […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold a meeting with the Organization of Agreement States and the Conference of Radiation Control Program Directors today, at 9:30 A.M. in Rockville, Md. Among the items on the agenda is the topic of Compatibility—the varying degrees of mandatory compliance that the NRC can place on its rules—as well as […]

The state of Vermont this weekend decided to continue its effort to shut down Entergy’s Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, appealing a Jan. 19 decision that may allow the plant to continue operations for 20 more years. Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell filed the appeal, on all aspects of the decision, on Feb. 18 with […]

Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff yesterday gave stakeholders some insight into potential changes that will appear in the draft Branch Technical Position on Concentration Averaging that will be released for public comment in May. At the Waste Management conference in Phoenix, Jim Kennedy, lead on the BTP revision group for NRC, said that the agency is […]

Stakeholders last week said they approved of the new direction and points of emphasis Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners gave staff on the site specific assessment rulemaking, but made suggestions for other issues they felt should be included. On March 2, the NRC held its first public meeting on the site specific assessment rulemaking since the agency’s […]

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee condemned Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko in an extensive report on NRC leadership released yesterday in advance of today’s hearing on the agency. “The leadership of Chairman Gregory Jaczko has undermined Commissioners, staff, and the public confidence that the NRC can continue to remain focused on its […]

Responding to the allegations against NRC Chairman Jaczko, Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) sent a letter to President Obama yesterday calling for his immediate removal. “I am very concerned that a bipartisan group of Commissioners have contacted your office with specific examples of intimidation, bullying and withholding of information by Chairman Jaczko. To my knowledge, in […]

In a hearing marked by numerous terse exchanges, Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko defended his management style at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing yesterday as he faced unprecedented allegations of intimidation and harassment from his fellow Commissioners and calls for his resignation from lawmakers. In testimony, the four other commissioners and […]

Gearing up to do an Environmental Impact Statement on the storage of spent nuclear fuel for up to hundreds of years, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission released a draft report yesterday on key assumptions for the study. The NRC “is anticipating that spent nuclear fuel will be stored longer than originally intended because of the uncertainties […]

Following the resignation late last month of the chief of staff to Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko, NRC General Counsel Stephen Burns plans to leave the agency by this spring. In April, Burns is set to take over as head of legal affairs for the Nuclear Energy Agency, based in Paris. Burns started working […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission filed a response yesterday to a legal challenge to the agency’s closeout of the Yucca Mountain repository licensing review. The issue stems from a petition in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that calls for a resumption of repository licensing, citing a requirement in the Nuclear Waste […]

Challengers in an ongoing lawsuit on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s closeout of its review of Yucca Mountain say that the agency has enough money to continue with the review. While NRC said in a brief filed earlier this month in the court battle that it did not have enough funds to complete its review, the […]

A court has granted expedited review of a petition by challengers to the Administration’s decision to shut down Yucca Mountain that could force the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to make a decision on licensing the repository. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit released an expedited schedule for the matter Friday, which calls […]

Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff hope to push back the release of the draft revisions to the Branch Technical Position on Concentration Averaging and Encapsulation to sometime this spring, RW Monitor has learned, giving them time to incorporate comments they received at an Oct. 20 meeting. “Staff are inclined to ask for an extension to the […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners will hold a public meeting today to vote on a staff petition to keep the NRC from acting as steward to the millions of Yucca Mountain licensing documents, and to hear from the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards on the effort to incorporate site-specific performance assessments into 10 CFR Part 61. […]

In coming weeks the NRC Commissioners will be intervening in staff’s ongoing Site Specific Assessment Rulemaking effort, Commissioner William Magwood confirmed yesterday, potentially directing the NRC staff to reconsider a handful of controversial provisions, including a recommendation to institute a 20,000-year period of performance. On the sidelines of a Commission meeting yesterday, Magwood told RW […]

Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will present their proposed revisions to the Branch Technical Position on Concentration Averaging and Encapsulation to the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards today. Staff previously presented changes to the BTP—the guidance document that establishes guidelines for blending of different classes of low-level radioactive waste—to the ACRS’ Radiation Protection and Nuclear Materials […]

Challengers to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s close out of the Yucca Mountain licensing process are calling for the court to compel the agency to start up its review of the repository within 30 days of a court order. The legal brief came after the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit released an […]

In a strong break from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s traditionally collegial structure, the four other members of the NRC raised “grave concerns” about the management style of NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko to the White House in an October letter released by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee late Friday. “In a long series of very […]