Industry will wait at least until May before seeing the rationale Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff used to justify parts of a coming rule to expand disposal options for Greater-Than-Class-C radioactive waste, officials said Tuesday in an online public meeting.
The two-hour, online-only meeting was the latest in a long string of opportunities for the public to participate in the making of combined rule, yet to be proposed, about Greater-Than-Class-C (GTCC), which includes things such as the insides of shuttered nuclear reactors, and other types of low level radioactive waste.
Among other things, NRC plans to allow states that have formally agreed to become their own radioactive-materials-enforcement agencies to dispose of GTCC in near surface disposal facilities, which are relatively plentiful, instead of in a deep geological repository such as Yucca Mountain, which does not exist.
On Tuesday, one meeting attendee, a compliance executive with European-owned uranium refiner Urenco USA, Eunice, N.M, wanted to know when and whether NRC staff would release their regulatory analysis for the proposed rule. The analysis includes staff’s projection about what it might cost NRC licensees to implement the updated regulation and why the staff made the choices they made.
“I was hoping to see a discussion on revised regulatory analysis” said Wyatt Padgett, Urenco USA’s head of compliance. “Will anything be shared before the rule goes to the commission or is the basis from the previous rulemaking effort still being used?”
“I don’t think you’re going to see anything be released before it goes to the commission,” said George Tartal, an official with NRC’s Office of Nuclear Material. However, “we’ve significantly revised the regulatory analysis from the previous version that you’ve seen. So you will see a lot of changes when you see the regulatory analysis that supports our rulemaking.”
NRC staff plans to send their proposed rule to the commission by May. Notionally, the final rule would appear in November 2025, after a public comment period that could lead to revisions of the rule, according to a timeline commission staff briefed at Tuesday’s meeting.
The proposed rule is supposed to combine a 2015 inquiry from Texas about a rules change for GTCC with changes to low-level waste covered by Title 10, Part 61 of the Code of Federal Regulations. It is also supposed to strike transuranic waste from a list of wastes not considered low-level and address disposal of depleted uranium from commercial enrichment operations, something of special concern to URENCO.
David Esh, a NRC senior risk analyst and one of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s technical leads on the rulemaking, lifted the hood on the rule crafting process a little on Tuesday.
Esh said one of staff’s big ideas is to allow NRC-regulated companies and entities analyze their own sites to get a grip on the hazards that are or might be present there.
The current rule was based in part on assumptions NRC made in its own analysis of a hypothetical site. The new rule would be “basically allowing the actual site to be analyzed rather than a generic site the regulatory analyzed,” Esh said.
This is “not the standard rulemaking,” said Esh.
