A board of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday reversed a prior order to allow the Sierra Club to argue one case against licensing of a facility in West Texas for temporary storage of spent fuel from nuclear power plants.
The NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) also rejected the environmental organization’s motion to amend that contention. With the ruling, the three-member, quasi-judicial panel has dismissed all requests for adjudicatory hearings in the licensing of the Interim Storage Partners site.
Interim Storage Partners, a joint venture of Orano and Waste Control Specialists, is seeking a 40-year federal license to build and operate a facility with a maximum storage capacity for 40,000 metric tons of used fuel. The facility would be built on Waste Control Specialists’ disposal complex in Andrews County, Texas. With license extensions, it could operate for up to 120 years.
Four separate groups filed petitions for intervention and adjudicatory hearings in the licensing proceeding: the Sierra Club; Beyond Nuclear; a coalition of environmental organizations led by Don’t Waste Michigan; and the partnering local energy concerns Fasken Land and Minerals and the Permian Basin Land and Royalty Organization. They made host of environmental, security, safety, and economic arguments against licensing.
The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board in August rejected the petitions from the other groups based on a combination of lack of standing to intervene and lack of admissible contentions. The board found the Sierra Club had standing but partially allowed just one of its 17 contentions.
That contention was that Interim Storage Partners failed to make available studies cited in the environmental report for the application to make the case that the storage facility would have no impact on two species of lizard in the region. The company subsequently attached those studies to the environmental report.
That “cured the omission,” the ASLB wrote in its order. “Sierra Club Contention 13, as initially admitted by the Board, is dismissed as moot.” That means the Sierra Club will not receive a hearing to argue its position.
The Sierra Club requested permission to amend its original contention, saying the newly available studies do not support the case against impact on the Texas horned lizard and dunes sagebrush lizard. The board, though, determined the group had not shown good cause for the amendment or that the new contention is admissible.
A lawyer for the Sierra Club this week did not respond to queries regarding a potential appeal of the latest decision or the ASLB’s earlier rejection of the other 16 contentions.
The other organizations have already appealed the board’s ruling on their petitions to the full commission. The four NRC commissioners have not yet ruled on the appeals.
The advocacy groups also filed for hearings in licensing of the second planned consolidated interim storage facility: Holtec International’s site in Lea County. N.M., with maximum storage exceeding 100,000 metric tons of waste. A technically separate Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, but featuring the same three members, in May rejected all petitions. Most of the petitioners have also appealed that decision – only NAC International, a used fuel storage company working on the Texas project, did not.
Both Interim Storage Partners and Holtec hope to receive their federal licenses and begin storage operations by the early 2020s.
It remains to be seen who will be their direct customers. The U.S. Department of Energy is legally responsible for disposal of the nation’s used fuel, a stockpile that stands at about 80,000 metric tons and grows by 2,000 metric tons annually. However, Energy Secretary Rick Perry affirmed last month that the agency is not authorized to contract for spent fuel storage, as the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act says it cannot take title to the waste until a permanent repository is ready. That has not happened, meaning Holtec and Interim Storage Partners might have to deal directly with the various nuclear utilities now stuck with the used fuel.
The separate-but-the-same Atomic Safety and Licensing Boards have also received requests to file late contentions in both licensings based on a new report from the federal Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. The petitioners are: the Sierra Club in the Holtec licensing; and the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development (SEED) Coalition in the ISP licensing (Austin, Texas-based SEED was the sole member of the Don’t Waste Michigan coalition found to have standing to intervene in that matter, based on geographic proximity to the site).
Both groups say their new contentions should be admitted because they contain information not available at the time of the original filings. The central matter is that the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board determined that transport of used fuel from all nuclear power plants to interim storage could not be completed prior to expiration of the sites’ licenses.
The companies and NRC staff oppose the potential new contentions.
In its Monday filing with the board, counsel for NRC staff said the Sierra Club failed to meet the federal standards for reopening a closed record: timeliness, addressing a significant safety or environmental matter; and that the new information would have altered the results of the initial ruling.
Specifically, the information on which the proposed new contention is based was available prior to publication of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board report, staff said.
“Central to Petitioner’s new contention that the environmental report (ER) inadequately discusses impacts of SNF transportation is its claim that SNF could not be removed from all reactor sites until approximately 2070 to 2100, and that this is not within the 20-year timeframe proposed by Holtec nor within the 40-year licensing period,” staff said. “But information asserting that SNF might not meet transportation requirements until as late as 2100 was previously presented in 2013, as the NWTRB report notes.”
The respective Atomic Safety and Licensing Boards will also rule on the new petitions.
