NAC International is asking the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to waive $632,398 in fees from its review of the company’s new transportation package for spent reactor fuel.
The costs were an unfair outcome of incorrect thermal modeling of the MAGNATRAN cask by an unidentified contractor for the federal agency, according to the Peachtree, Ga.-based manufacturer of nuclear materials storage and transport systems.
The company ultimately was charged just over $2 million in review fees before the NRC last April issued the certificate of compliance (CoC) after a review of more than eight years. The certificate formally enables NAC to use and market the cask.
“NAC believes that approximately $632,398 of those fees can be attributed to delays and unnecessary rework resulting from the extended review process and the lack of openness and transparency with regard to the Contractor’s work,” NAC International President and CEO Kent Cole wrote in a Sept. 11 letter to NRC Chief Financial Officer Maureen Wylie.
Cole also said his company sustained more than $500,000 in labor costs to address the thermal-modeling discrepancy. He noted that the NRC does not appear to be regulatorily prohibited from paying interest on improper fees. The NRC should do so for the disputed fees in this case “to make NAC whole,” according to Cole, though he said the company is willing to drop that matter in favor of expedited resolution of the fees issue.
The NRC on Tuesday said it was reviewing the request.
“NAC has discussed this with NRC in the past and carefully stated our concerns with support in the letter,” Doug Jacobs, the company’s vice president for projects, said by email Wednesday. “We paid the fees and are waiting for NRC’s response. We don’t have any further details or comments to share at this time. There is a process for these matters that we are following. We plan to continue the dialogue and any related correspondence with the NRC staff.”
The MAGNATRAN transport cask would be used to carry NAC’s MAGNASTOR used fuel canisters during transport. The canisters are deployed at four U.S. nuclear power sites and anticipated to be used elsewhere in the United States and abroad.
NAC is partnering in Interim Storage Partners’ project to build a facility in Andrews County, Texas, for centralized storage of spent fuel assemblies now kept on-site at nuclear power plants around the country.
The company submitted its application for MAGNATRAN in January 2011. In his letter, Cole said management learned last March of an error in the contractor’s thermal modeling for the NRC review of the cask certificate of compliance. Specifically, the agency and its contractor employed “an assumed configuration for the corner geometry between the MAGNATRAN tubes” that did not line up with the actual design the cask, the CEO wrote. This led to a 73-degree difference in calculations for peak temperature for the outer layer of used fuel rods.
From September 2016 to March 2019, the company responded to a number of requests for additional information from the NRC that grew out of this error, according to Cole. That stretched out the application process by 2 ½ years and added hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees, he wrote.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission collects about 90% of its budget in fees for its work from licensees and applicants.
The contractor appears to have identified the problem by February 2018, but NAC was not informed of the modeling error for more than a year, Cole stated. In a presentation during a closed meeting with NAC and the NRC that month, the contractor said that it had conducted new thermal modeling that largely matched the data from NAC, he added.
