Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
9/4/2015
Following a request for an extension from the state of Nevada and other stakeholders, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week added a month to the public comment period for the draft supplemental environmental impact statement on groundwater effects from the Yucca Mountain project.
Nevada had requested an additional 60 days to submit its comments, so as to allow “that its experts will have an adequate time for review,” according to Martin Malsch, an attorney representing the state. The NRC, however, determined that to adhere to its timeline of issuing a final supplemental EIS in the front half of 2016, it could only grant a one-month extension.
“We also have an obligation to complete our work on the supplement in a timely manner and on a relatively fixed budget,” NRC Deputy Director for the Yucca Mountain Directorate Jim Rubenstone said at a public comment meeting Thursday in Rockville, Md. “Therefore, we are announcing that we will be extending the comment period an additional month and relatively fixed budget. Therefore, we are announcing that we will be extending the comment period an additional month, with a new closing date of Nov. 20.”
The NRC staff found that the proposed repository would have a minimal radiological impact on groundwater surrounding the site. The staff’s draft analysis bolsters the safety case for the shuttered project, which the NRC found to meet most regulatory standards for public health and safety earlier this year in its safety evaluation report. According to the draft EIS, the radiological impacts to groundwater resulted in a “small” category distinction, the lowest-impact EIS category, because exposure to radiological materials by the public and environment from the groundwater would result in only a small fraction of the annual background radiation dose.
The NRC took over responsibility for the document after the Department of Energy originally said it would complete the EIS on groundwater issues early last year. DOE later decided against completing the report, choosing to give the NRC all the technical information needed to finish it instead. That, according to DOE, satisfies its legal responsibilities under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.
Nevada Previews EIS Findings Defense
Nevada, meanwhile, used the public comment period to preview its planned argument against the draft findings in the EIS, focusing on the changing scope of the DOE license application. DOE had submitted the license application to the NRC in 2008, but when the Obama Administration shuttered the project in 2010, the NRC suspended the license review process– only to have a federal court require the NRC to restart the review until all appropriated funds were spent.
“The scope of [NRC] Staff’s current draft supplement is apparently controlled by Staff’s Sept. 5, 2008 adoption decision,” Malsch said. “That decision included an evaluation of whether significant new information or other considerations had arisen since the DOE’s 2002 and 2008 environmental impact statements that could affect the conclusions in those documents. That was seven years ago.”
Malsch listed the DOE decision to “decomingle” defense and commercial waste for storage, the challenge the Basin and Range national monument designation could pose to transportation of waste to the Yucca site, and canister repackaging as “significant new information” that changes any findings within the department’s latest EIS, essentially nullifying DOE’s EIS findings.
