July 15, 2014

NRC Chair Calls for New Decommissioning Rulemaking

By ExchangeMonitor

Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Allison Macfarlane joined industry stakeholders yesterday in calling for a rulemaking to better define the decommissioning process for commercial reactors during a Commission briefing on nuclear plant decommissioning. With the recent surge of plants entering premature shutdown, the NRC’s lack of regulations to show the difference between an operating site and a decommissioning site has led to a slew of exemption requests, some of which have drawn the ire of Senate lawmakers. “I think we need to do rulemaking,” Macfarlane said during the briefing. “These reactors have been operating for more than four decades. What are we doing? Why don’t we have a process that is clear? Clearly, there is a lot of confusion; not just on the public’s part, but also on the licensee’s part.” The NRC originally began a rulemaking process in 2000 to update the Commission’s policies on decommissioning sites, but the fallout from the terrorists’ attacks on 9/11 put the rulemaking on the back burner.

Macfarlane’s call for a decommissioning rulemaking was echoed by industry representatives. Dominion’s Senior Vice President of Nuclear Operations Daniel Stoddard indicated that the confusion and inefficiency of the NRC when reviewing the Kewaunee exemption requests wasted valuable resources that good have went elsewhere. “The bottom-line result of limited guidance confusion regarding applicability of specific regulations and questions regarding the use of precedence is a significant additional interface to travel time, and review time and resources are required to deal with exemption requests—time and resources that could be devoted to activities that have greater safety significance,” Stoddard said. “. A measure of this resource requirement could be seen in review fees for license amendment requests and exemption requests for Kewaunee that were in excess of $1 million per year. That represents not just an expenditure of trust funds, but it also represents an opportunity cost for the NRC staff and the licensee staff.”

Not everyone was as convinced, however, that a rulemaking would solve the problem. Commissioner Kristine Svinicki warned that rulemaking processes could be cumbersome, and with each site presenting unique decommissioning problems needed to be solved, it could result in the loss of vital flexibility. “Rulemaking is really an art form,” Svinicki said. “It’s like writing statute. It has to be clearly written, and although it’s clear to see that that suggestion of having part 50 issue analyses have some consideration of decommissioning, it might be really clumsy to do. We need to think about that a little bit. We need to keep the appropriate flexibility.”

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