Organizations with drastically different views on the value and future of nuclear power are debating whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should revive a moribund update to regulations for recycling of spent reactor fuel.
Staff at the NRC expect early next year to recommend a potential path forward for a limited spent fuel reprocessing rulemaking, which was suspended in 2016. It is currently unfunded.
If reactivated, the intent is to augment current rules for used fuel reprocessing plants. “These requirements would provide an effective, transparent, and efficient approach to licensing and regulating a reprocessing facility,” according to the web page for the rulemaking. “The scope of this rulemaking would affect the licensees and applicants of nuclear reprocessing facilities.”
The United States has not had an operational reprocessing plant for nearly five decades, and none appear to be on the horizon.
“While no new reprocessing facilities are planned in the United States at this time, this in itself should not be the rationale for suspending rulemaking,” American Nuclear Society Executive Director and CEO Craig Piercy wrote in a May 28 letter to NRC officials. “Rulemaking is a deliberative process, and it is important to establish a comprehensive regulatory framework prior to any license application being submitted.”
The 10,000-member professional organization has in past policy papers supported minimization of waste as a means to strengthen the viability of the domestic and global nuclear energy industries, and specifically recycling to reclaim some portion of the 95% of untapped energy in spent fuel, Piercy wrote.
In its own May 28 letter, the Nuclear Energy Institute said the NRC should not formally end the rulemaking. Instead, the proceeding should remain suspended while staff evaluates possible updates to the scope of the effort in connection with needs for next-generation power reactors and forecasts how much the rulemaking would cost, wrote Rod McCullum, senior director for used fuel and decommissioning at the Washington, D.C.-based industry policy group. That work, he added, should begin now.
“We believe that the landscape for reprocessing has changed significantly from what NRC was considering
previously,” McCullum said. Specifically, he added, advanced nuclear reactors in development could generate lower amounts of spent fuel and could even use recycled fuel from other plants.
Rulemakings generally cost $2.4 million, according to the NRC presentation for a March 4 meeting on the reprocessing issue.
Environmental and antinuclear organizations say the rulemaking should remain on ice, as should any reprocessing in the United States.
“I vehemently go on record in opposition to you carrying forward with this petition. So, please stop it. Take that $2.4 million, invest in looking at how you’re digging a deeper and deeper hole,” Michael Keegan, with the advocacy group Don’t Waste Michigan, said during the March meeting.
Radioactive waste has been building up in the United States since the start of the Atomic Age. There is now more than 80,000 metric tons of used fuel in temporary storage, mostly on-site at dozens of nuclear power plants where it was generated. The nation does not yet have a disposal facility for the material, nearly four decades after Congress put the Department of Energy in charge of the job.
The United States’ sole commercial nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, operated by Nuclear Fuel Services at West Valley, N.Y., shut down in 1972 after just six years of operations. A handful of other projects never achieved liftoff. Two persistent obstacles over the decades have been cost and the potential for proliferation of plutonium that would be reclaimed by reprocessing.
Federal rules that address those issues head-on would cut into the regulatory uncertainty over building reprocessing systems, thus reducing expenses and the hazards of such projects, Piercy stated in his letter last week.
“Addressing regulatory gaps makes the requirements that a facility must meet clearer up front, thereby minimizing the risk of subsequent design changes to address new or reinterpreted regulatory requirements,” Steve Nesbit, a former Duke Energy executive who chairs the ANS Nuclear Waste Policy Task Force, said in a statement Friday to RadWaste Monitor. “Evolving requirements inevitably translate into higher costs, either directly from unforeseen design and construction activities or indirectly from schedule delays.”
There appeared to be commercial interest in 2006 in establishing a domestic capability, which led to NRC consideration of the regulatory and resource needs for licensing reprocessing plants, Wendy Reed, a chemist in the agency’s Division of Fuel Management, said during the March meeting. In 2008, three companies in the nuclear industry informed the regulator of their plans to seek licenses for such operations. Interest was up to four companies by 2013, according to the NRC presentation.
Those companies were AREVA (since restructured into several companies, including Orano), Westinghouse, GE Hitachi, and EnergySolutions. No applications were ever filed.
Interest in reprocessing was spurred by indications in the mid-2000s that the nuclear industry might build upward of 30 new nuclear reactors, “so there was anticipation for a high demand for nuclear fuel,” NRC spokesman David McIntyre said by email Wednesday. However, beyond two new reactors being built at the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia, those newbuilds did not materialize.
In a brief email to Reed on Feb.21, Salt Lake City-based nuclear services firm EnergySolutions said it would not attend the March 4 meeting as it no longer plans to pursue reprocessing. Westinghouse also did not attend. Orano and GE Hitachi sent representatives to the meeting; they also called on the agency to resuming the rulemaking, but did not say they would file license applications for reprocessing plants “in the near future,” according to McIntyre.
The potential rules update began over 14 years ago with a staff report to the commission on plans “for addressing the regulatory and resource implications of the spent nuclear fuel recycling program” that Congress had in 2005 ordered the Department of Energy to stand up.
A follow-up staff report filed with the commission in 2009 identified 23 “gaps” in the regulatory framework for licensing, including: the minimal attention given to reprocessing plants in existing regulations for licensing nuclear facilities; the absence of resources for temporary commercial storage of solid high-level waste generated by reprocessing; and the lack of regulatory definitions for some waste streams from reprocessing.
In a draft regulatory basis two years later, staff recommended establishing an all new regulation for reprocessing as the most efficient means for licensing and regulating such facilities. They prepared recommendations for resolving the 19 high- and medium-priority gaps.
Two years after that, the commission directed staff to restrict their work to resolving gap No. 5 – “Risk considerations for a production facility licensed” under federal regulations for licensing of special nuclear material. Agency staff suspended the rulemaking in 2016 in the face of a tight budget and apparent disinterest from industry.
“The NRC is currently evaluating whether to move forward with the limited rulemaking while giving consideration to input received as a result of the March 4, 2020 public meeting on reprocessing,” McIntyre stated. A final technical basis for addressing gap No. 5 is also anticipated in early 2021, the agency said in March.
During the meeting, Orano Federal Services technical consultant Sven Bader said the rulemaking would be central in considering waste solutions for the nation’s fuel cycle facilities. “And just having the uncertainty of the regulatory information is part of the decision-making process.”
Bader noted Orano’s continued operation of the La Hague reprocessing plant in France, as well as its ongoing research and development of ways to make reprocessing more efficient and less costly. That could involve smaller, modular sites that receive lesser amounts of material, he said.
Orano has no plans to file for a reprocessing license in 2020, but is eager to support any reprocessing efforts at the Department of Energy, Bader added.
Leaders at DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, including Assistant Secretary Rita Baranwal, have indicated they are working on some initial reprocessing opportunities. Baranwal specifically has floated the idea of using foreign facilities to recycle U.S. used fuel. To date, the Energy Department has not discussed additional details of its plans. The agency did not respond to a query this week.
During the March meeting, representatives of a number of advocacy organizations spoke against resuming the rulemaking and of reprocessing in general.
“Just from a policy perspective, we don’t support spent nuclear fuel reprocessing, primarily for proliferation and nuclear terrorism reasons, as separation and processing of plutonium and other weapons-usable materials only increases the risk associated with the nuclear fuel cycle and is not needed for the safe production of nuclear power,” said Edwin Lyman, director for nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Speaking immediately after Bader, Beyond Nuclear radioactive waste watchdog Kevin Kamps said reprocessing plants at La Hague and the Sellafield site in the United Kingdom have discharged liquid radioactive waste into nearby waters. Gaseous discharges into the atmosphere are another concern, among other dangers posed by reprocessing, he said. The $2.4 million would be better used for environmental remediation of contamination at nuclear sites such as West Valley, Kamps said.
