There is no need to rebuild the database of documents for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s review of the license application for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, according to the lobbying body for the nuclear industry.
The Nuclear Energy Institute earlier this month threw its weight behind keeping the Licensing Support Network (LSN) within the NRC’s online documents system, with a fully automated means of adding, revising, or deleting documents.
That option “offers access to both existing and new documentary material to both adjudication participants and the public at the lowest cost, shortest implementation timeframe, and lowest risk score,” Rod McCullum, senior director for used fuel and decommissioning at NEI, wrote in a Feb. 13 letter to Andrew Bates, chairman of the Licensing Support Network Advisory Review Panel (LSNARP).
The Nuclear Energy Institute and other LSNARP members had until Feb. 13 to offer thoughts or new proposals in response to an NRC staff report issued in December regarding options for reconstituting the documents system.
The NRC closed the Licensing Support Network in 2011 after the Obama administration suspended licensing activities for Yucca Mountain. At the time the system held nearly 3.7 million documents from parties to the regulator’s adjudication of the Department of Energy license application, which have been placed in the NRC’s Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS). With the Trump administration looking to restart the Yucca licensing process, the NRC report offered four options to reconstitute the system: keeping the existing network in ADAMS and sharing additional documents by means such as mail or email; using the searchable ADAMS LSN Library; moving the library to the Cloud; and rebuilding the network.
