It could be two years before a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission board holds a hearing in the single contention it allowed against licensing of a consolidated interim storage facility in West Texas for spent nuclear power reactor fuel.
The anticipated “trigger date” for parties to begin filing various paperwork and then conduct the evidentiary hearing itself is May 2021 – the month staff at the NRC is expected to file a final environmental impact statement for the facility planned by Interim Storage Partners (ISP).
The company, a joint venture of Orano and Waste Control Specialists, is seeking a 40-year NRC license to build and operate a facility that could hold up to 40,000 metric tons of used fuel now stranded at power plants around the country. The storage site would be built on Waste Control Specialists’ disposal property in Andrews County, near the border with New Mexico.
That location, plus an even larger facility Holtec International hopes to build in southeastern New Mexico, could enable the U.S. Department of Energy to finally meet its legal responsibility to remove used fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants. The deadline for that to begin, under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, was Jan. 31, 1998.
Interim Storage Partners filed its license application in June 2018, reviving an application that had been previously submitted and then suspended solely by Waste Control Specialists.
The Sierra Club and other nuclear and environmental advocacy groups petitioned for hearings to present a long list of contentions addressing the environmental, safety, security, and legal ramifications of licensing.
However, an NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) in August approved in part just one of the Sierra Club’s contentions and rejected the other petitioners for lack of standing to intervene or for failing to submit admissible contentions. The other groups are appealing the ruling to the full commission.
The accepted contention involved ISP’s failure to include five documents in its environmental report for the license application that support its case regarding impacts of the facility on the Texas horned lizard and the dunes sagebrush lizard. The paperwork fight on that item has continued since August: ISP filed a motion to dismiss the contention, saying it addressed the omission by attaching the missing documents to its environmental report; the Sierra Club petitioned to amend the contention, saying the newly added reference materials support its case about the impact of the storage operation on the lizards; and ISP and NRC staff argued against the amendment.
In an Oct. 16 initial scheduling order, the three-member, quasi-judicial ASLB said the Sierra Club would have 40 days after the trigger date to file written testimony, exhibits, and other material for the evidentiary hearing. Interim Storage Partners and NRC staff would have 30 days to respond to the filings, then the Sierra Club has another 20 days for its reply. Motions to strike any part of the material would be required within 30 days of its filing.
“Although the specific time and date for the evidentiary hearing will be determined later, the Board currently contemplates that it will commence between 50 and 65 days after service of the last prehearing evidentiary submission,” according to the scheduling order.
Staff at the NRC expect in May 2021 to complete both the final environmental impact statement and safety and security reviews for the license application. Interim Storage Partners hopes to receive its license that year, then to begin the first phase of construction in 2022 and start taking used fuel by July 2023. The license would initially allow for storage of 5,000 metric tons of fuel assemblies, but could be amended later for increased authorized capacity.
Holtec International, an energy technology company based in Camden, N.J., filed its application in 2017 for a storage facility with total capacity for about 120,000 metric tons of spent fuel. An NRC Atomic Safety Licensing Board, technically distinct but with the same three members as the board managing the ISP adjudication, in May rejected all intervention requests from the Sierra Club and other petitioners. The groups, largely the same as those in the ISP case, have mostly appealed the decision to the commission.
