Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
6/12/2015
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied again this week an appeal of its Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel Rule as it relates to the licensing/re-licensing reviews of nuclear power reactors. The appeal, filed by a collection of environmental groups, sought to halt licensing/re-licensing reviews of a series of nuclear plants across the country due to what they called NRC’s failure to adequately address the necessary findings ordered by the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, as outlined in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). In its denial, the NRC cited its determination from earlier this year that its interpretation of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 only requires the Commission to prove the technical feasibility of continued storage and not the likelihood of a repository.
In that determination, the NRC stated the petitioners’ proposal for a waste confidence safety finding was met by the General Environmental Impact Statement released with the rulemaking. “Indeed, our confidence in the safety and technical feasibility of systems for the storage and disposal of spent fuel has only increased since the late 1970s, as demonstrated by our expanded regulatory scheme and the ongoing licensing of such systems, as well as the efforts that are under way—both in the United States and abroad—to develop repositories for the disposal of spent fuel,” the Commission said. “Thus, today we not only address Petitioners’ concerns, but we also take the opportunity to confirm the continued validity of our determinations regarding the technical feasibility of safe spent fuel storage and ultimate disposal in a repository.”
The challengers include many of the parties involved in the original suit that required the NRC to re-do its Waste Confidence rulemaking with a stricter look at environmental effects of continued storage of spent nuclear fuel, including: a state coalition of New York, Vermont, and Connecticut; the Prairie Island Indian Community; a group of nine environmental groups; and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The NRC, for its part, determined in its response rulemaking that spent fuel could be safely stored on site well past a reactor’s lifespan. When the NRC first issued a revised waste confidence rule in 2010, the Commission extended the length of time assumed to be safe for storage of spent fuel at a reactor site from 30 to 60 years. In its new update, the NRC based its rule on a generic environmental impact statement that found the environmental impact of storing spent fuel on-site was small in most categories, including an indefinite timeframe. This final rulemaking, though, removed language concerning a timeline for the availability of a repository after the Commission determined that was a policy decision outside the NRC’s regulation jurisdiction.
