The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has postponed until the end of February a meeting of the advisory panel on management of the Licensing Support Network, the repository of documents on the agency’s review of the license application for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
Last month, the NRC announced a Jan. 30-31 meeting of the Licensing Support Network Advisory Review Panel (LSNARP) at agency headquarters in Rockville, Md., to consider reconstitution of the document repository. The state of Nevada and the nuclear industry’s lobbying arm requested the NRC postpone the meeting, and an agency spokesperson said Friday it has been rescheduled to Feb. 27-28.
The Licensing Support Network was shut down in 2011 after the Obama administration halted work on developing and licensing the Nevada disposal site, but close to 3.7 million documents remain stored in the LSN Library within the NRC’s ADAMS online document database.
With the Trump administration aiming to resume the Yucca licensing process, the NRC on Dec. 21 issued a report laying out options for rebuilding or replacing the Licensing Support Network in case the agency resumes adjudication of the Energy Department license application. The options are: keeping the existing network in ADAMS and sharing additional documents by means such as mail or email; using the searchable ADAMS LSN Library; moving the library to the Cloud; and rebuilding the network.
“Nevada has a serious concern about the preliminary agenda and timing of the scheduled meeting, given the very recent issuance of the NRC Staff’s unsolicited LSN replacement/reconstitution options paper,” Robert Halstead, executive director of Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects, wrote in a Dec. 22 letter to Andrew Bates, LSNARP chairman.
The state of Nevada, and potentially other LSNARP members beyond NRC staff, had not been informed until Dec. 18 that the agency was carrying out the options analysis, Halstead wrote. Nevada and other panel members might have their own recommendations on managing the documents network, he stated, but there is not enough time for such a process – or even to analyze the alternatives readied by NRC staff.
Based on that, Halstead urged the upcoming LSNARP meeting be delayed until all members could be queried on whether they might have their own recommendations.
Separately, the Nuclear Energy Institute said Tuesday it was prepared to participate in the January meeting, but concurred that a delay would give LSNARP members additional time to consider the proposed options and potentially develop their own recommendations. “NEI therefore supports a very limited deferral (30 to 45 days) of the meetings,” according to a Jan. 2 letter to Bates from Rod McCullum, NEI senior director for fuel and decommissioning.
Along with the state of Nevada and NEI, LSNARP members include the Department of Energy, NRC staff, nine counties and one city in Nevada, and several Native American tribes and organizations. None of the other review panel members submitted requests to delay the meeting, the NRC spokesperson said.
NRC Spent $16K of Nuclear Waste Fund in November
Separately, the NRC in November spent $16,743 of its remaining Nuclear Waste Fund balance, leaving it with just under $525,000 to spend, according to the agency’s latest update to Congress.
The fund in total as of January 2017 had a balance of roughly $34 billion collected from nuclear power generators to fund development of a permanent repository for spent commercial reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste.
Two years after the Obama administration suspended work on Yucca Mountain, a 2013 federal court ruling forced the NRC to resume the licensing process for the Department of Energy repository. As of November, the regulator had spent over $12.9 million of the $13.6 million it had on hand at the time of the court decision.
Roughly $11 million was used for three specific projects: finishing a safety evaluation report on Yucca Mountain, a supplement to the environmental impact statement on the site, and loading the Licensing Support Network into the ADAMS database.
Nearly all the spending in November — $15,761 – was for ongoing planning of the LSNARP meeting early this year. “On November 8, 2017, agency staff conducted a training session on the functionality and operations of the recently-completed ADAMS LSN Library for individuals associated with governmental entities or organizations that are LSNARP members, participants in prior LSNARP meetings, or parties to, or otherwise participating in, the Yucca Mountain adjudication,” according to the update, submitted to lawmakers on Dec. 21 and posted on the NRC website on Dec. 29.
The November spending left the NRC’s total Nuclear Waste Fund balance at $574,339. Accounting for $52,186 in unspent obligations, its accessible balance was $522,339.
