March 17, 2014

NRC MOVING TO PUSH BACK RELEASE OF BTP ON CONCENTRATION AVERAGING

By ExchangeMonitor

Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff hope to push back the release of the draft revisions to the Branch Technical Position on Concentration Averaging and Encapsulation to sometime this spring, RW Monitor has learned, giving them time to incorporate comments they received at an Oct. 20 meeting. “Staff are inclined to ask for an extension to the due date, and to address the October 20 comments in the next revision with a potential schedule slip to March,” an NRC official told RW Monitor.

NRC staff released an early draft of the BTP revisions to stakeholders in September, and since then have received feedback from both stakeholders at the Oct. 20 meeting in Albuquerque, N.M. and the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguard’s Radiation Protection and Nuclear Materials subcommittee at an Oct. 4 meeting. Staff are set to present the proposed revisions to the full ACRS in early December. Staff told stakeholders Oct. 20 that they planned to either reissue the same language for public comment in January, or issue a version that has been revised based on some, but not all, of the comments staff has received to date. However, stakeholders pushed back against that suggestion, urging the NRC to delay issuing a draft that may be outdated or half-baked. Lisa Edwards, project manager at the Electric Power Research Institute, said at the Oct. 20 meeting, “I would rather have a draft of the BTP that reflects your current thinking in March than get what you have right now in January. The more insight we have as to where you’re going, the better informed our feedback to you can be.”

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