DOE SET TO DELIVER YUCCA INFO ‘AS EARLY AS THE END OF APRIL’

The Department of Energy plans to deliver the technical report containing information needed to complete the Yucca Mountain groundwater supplemental Environmental Impact Statement to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission “as early as the end of April,” said William Boyle, DOE’s director of the Office of Used Nuclear Fuel Disposition R&D, during an NRC public meeting yesterday. The NRC held the meeting to better understand what DOE would be submitting after it said in a letter in late February that it would not complete the supplemental EIS that NRC had requested be completed. According to Boyle, DOE’s technical report will feature most of the same information that originally appeared in its 2009 report. “The physical world for the most part has not changed in that part of Southern Nevada,” Boyle said. “It’s still in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada. It’s still a desert, and so the two reports, the one from 2009 and 2014, will look the same.”

From the NRC perspective, it is still unclear if it will be able to complete the supplemental EIS in DOE’s stead. The NRC staff at the meeting could not postulate if the Commission would complete the supplemental EIS or what it would cost to complete it, because the Commission has not yet issued a new direction forward. The NRC issued an order in November setting forth a pathway to re-start the Yucca Mountain licensing review, including the request for a supplemental EIS from DOE on groundwater issues to satisfy requirements set forth in the National Environmental Policy Act. DOE had initially planned to move forward with the NRC’s request for the study, but in February, DOE argued that since it submitted a groundwater EIS in 2008, it did not have to update the EIS to fulfill its Nuclear Waste Policy Act legal obligations.