The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will not require the expedited transfer of spent nuclear fuel pools to dry cask storage. The Commission voted 4-1 to close the Tier 3 Japan lessons-learned activity, concluding that the NRC Staff’s recommendation satisfied safety requirements. The NRC Staff’s draft study on spent fuel pools, released last year, determined that U.S. spent fuel pools were not in danger from severe earthquakes and that calls for moving the spent nuclear fuel to dry casks would not provide any “substantial safety enhancements.”
NRC Chair Allison Macfarlane was the lone holdout that wanted to keep the matter open so other natural disaster scenarios could be studied further. Before her appointment as NRC Chair, Macfarlane had previously written a paper in 2003 that criticized long-term spent fuel pool storage. “In my view, the staff has not adequately explored the issue of spent fuel management in the pool and as a result, I do not have adequate information on which to base a view on the need to require approaches that may lead to some form of expedited transfer of spent fuel from pools to dry casks,” Macfarlane wrote in her voting comments. “The staff has not properly explored all potential initiating events, in this case only considering seismic initiators.” She later said in her voting comments that a more “holistic” analysis of events that could cause pool drainage is needed.
The Commission’s decision has drawn the ire of some senators from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. EPW Chair Barbara Boxer (D- Calif.) and Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) last week criticized the NRC’s spent fuel pool policy during a hearing on decommissioning plants, and the two senators, along with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), introduced the Dry Cask Storage Act of 2014, which would ensure that every nuclear reactor operator complies with an NRC-approved plan that would require the safe removal of spent nuclear fuel from the spent fuel pools and place that spent fuel into dry cask storage within seven years of the time the plan is submitted to the NRC. “Overcrowded spent nuclear fuel pools are a disaster waiting to happen,” Markey said in a statement this week. “Experts agree an accident at one of these pools could result in damage as bad as that caused by an accident at an operating nuclear reactor. It is time for the NRC to post the ‘Danger’ sign outside the fuel pools and begin to swiftly move spent fuel to safer storage now before a disaster occurs.”
Jobs