Waste Control Specialists’ (WCS) application to build and operate a consolidated interim storage facility for nuclear waste in West Texas is ready for Nuclear Regulatory Commission review, the agency said in a letter to the company Thursday.
The NRC in June said the application filed two months earlier lacked the technical detail needed for the agency to conduct a complete review. Since then, the company has been filing supplemental information with the regulator, and on Thursday, NRC Spent Fuel Management Division Director Mark Lombard wrote in a letter to the company that the application is ready for formal review. NRC staff estimates that the application review will cost about $7.5 million.
Waste Control Specialists hopes to begin operating the facility by 2021, though the application process has already been delayed by the NRC’s demand for additional information. The company is seeking a 40-year license for a facility that would hold 40,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel now stored at commercial reactor sites around the country. The facility would be built in eight phases at WCS’ waste storage complex near Andrews, Texas.
The NRC license review will include safety, technical, and environmental impact evaluations, which together typically take three years. It will also require a site-specific analysis, which analyzes short-term and long-term impacts of the site and allows the public to request a hearing before the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB), a process that could significantly lengthen the review.
Lombard, in Thursday’s letter to WCS Vice President of Licensing and Corporate Compliance Michael Ford, said the agency anticipates completing its safety and environmental reviews by the third quarter of fiscal 2019.
“This schedule assumes that WCS will provide timely and high quality (requests for additional information) responses in the fourth quarter FY 2017 for the environmental review and in the fourth quarter FY 2017 and the second quarter FY 2018, if necessary, for the safety review,” Lombard wrote.
The planned storage facility could fall under the Department of Energy’s consent-based siting process, which the Obama administration implemented as an alternative to canceled plans for a geologic repository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The Trump administration reportedly plans to restart the Yucca Mountain licensing process with the NRC, and it’s unclear what the future holds for consent-based siting. DOE released a draft document for the process just before Trump took office.
The NRC is accepting public comments on the scope of the application’s environmental impact statement through March 13. The agency also has scheduled two public meetings near the proposed facility to discuss the environmental review. The meeting are as follows:
– 7-10 p.m. Mountain time, Feb. 13, at the Lea County Event Center, 5101 N. Lovington Highway, in Hobbs, N.M.
– 7-10 p.m. Central time, Feb. 15, at the James Roberts Center, 855 TX-176, in Andrews, Texas.
Holtec International also plans to submit a consolidated interim storage license application to the NRC for its own facility in New Mexico, about 12 miles away from DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad. The company is eyeing a March submittal date for a 120,000-metric-ton capacity facility. Mike Stake, a venture capitalist in South Carolina, has also announced his intention to submit an application for an interim storage facility that would handle waste in his state, though his concept is far less developed than the other two.
An estimated 75,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel is stranded on-site at nuclear facilities in 40 states, resulting from DOE’s failure to take title to the waste, stemming from the political stalemate over Yucca Mountain.
