The five members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were scheduled to testify in the Senate Wednesday about the agency’s fiscal year 2024 budget request.
The testimony, in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, was scheduled to begin at 10:00 a.m., according to the committee’s website, where there was to be a video stream of the proceedings.
The NRC, regulator of civilian nuclear power plants and the radioactive waste they create, seeks about $979.2 million for fiscal year 2024: some $50 million million more than the roughly $927 million it got for 2023 in an omnibus spending bill passed in December.
In its latest budget justification, the NRC predicted it would offset about $808 million of its 2024 request with charges to its licenses, including nuclear power generators. Congress would then have to make up the difference of about $156 million, which would be a little under $20 million below the 2023 appropriation. Government spending years begin Oct. 1.
In the wake of big federal stimulus and bailout bills passed last year, the NRC is facing both the unprecedented task of re-licensing a nuclear power plant that has shut down but may restart — the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Calvert, Mich. — and renewing the license of a plant that planned to shut down but will instead keep its two reactors online until 2030, about five years longer than planned. The latter is the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in Avila Beach, Calif.
With the combined effects of the 2022 Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reductio Act, NRC is also dealing with shifting industry thought about nuclear decommissioning.
As federal cash infusions and power-generating tax credits prompt more plant operators to stay online rather than decommission their reactors, the NRC is considering whether to let operating plants tap into decommissioning funds to replace major pieces of equipment.
Industry says these are essentially decommissioning activities. The NRC has not made up its mind, but is willing to hear what the industry and the public have to say.
