Staff at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission aims by the end of February to determine whether to transition to a full technical review of Holtec International’s application to build a facility for interim storage of spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors.
The pending completion of the NRC acceptance review of the 2017 application comes as the agency waits to see whether the Department of Energy will issue a topical safety analysis report (TSAR) that could address key technical issues for temporary storage of used fuel.
The Energy Department is mandated under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act to find a permanent home for the nation’s growing stockpile of spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste, but has made little progress on siting, licensing, and building the repository in the last 36 years. Meanwhile, the federal government has already incurred more than $6 billion in liability payments to nuclear utilities forced in the interim to manage the spent fuel.
There has been growing interest in recent years in finding a small number of centralized storage sites to keep what is now more than 75,000 metric tons of waste until the final resting place is ready — probably decades from now.
Camden, N.J.-based energy technology company Holtec in March 2017 filed a license application with the NRC for a facility in southeastern New Mexico with capacity to hold up to 120,000 metric tons of spent fuel in underground storage systems. The regulator then initiated its acceptance review to determine whether Holtec had provided all the information needed to evaluate the application. It requested supplemental environmental and safety data, which Holtec submitted in October and December of last year.
In two public events over the last week, senior NRC officials said a staff decision on docketing the application is expected in early 2018. An agency spokesman confirmed Wednesday the end-of-February timeline.
The full technical review, covering safety and environmental matters, would be expected to take three years, according to Scott Moore, deputy director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards.
At an industry event Thursday, Holtec Vice President for Engineering and Licensing Stefan Anton laid out an aggressive schedule for bringing the facility online: licensing and the start of construction in 2019, followed by completion and receipt of the first waste shipment in 2022.
The licensing schedule might be “a little bit optimistic, but we’ll see,”Anton told participants at the Institute for Nuclear Materials Management Spent Fuel Management Seminar in Alexandria, Va. He said Holtec alone would not have sufficient funds for the project (without mentioning a specific cost), which would be dependent on the outcome of negotiations with potential clients.
Holtec was the second company to submit a license application to the NRC for consolidated interim spent fuel storage. Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists filed its request in April 2016 for a facility that could hold up to 40,000 metric tons of waste at the company’s disposal complex in West Texas. The application made it through the acceptance review, but WCS last April asked the regulator to suspend the technical review ahead of the company’s then-pending acquisition by low-level radioactive waste rival EnergySolutions, of Salt Lake City. A federal judge in June 2017 blocked the deal on antitrust grounds asserted by the U.S. Department of Justice.
NRC officials said both at the INMM conference and a recent hearing of the commission that it remains uncertain whether Waste Control Specialists will resume its license application. Alec Hoppes, senior director for government affairs and advocacy at Orano (formerly AREVA), which had joined the WCS effort, said during the industry conference he could not discuss the future of the license application.
TSAR
Meanwhile, the Department of Energy topical safety analysis report would be expected to address technical issues with consolidated interim storage of used fuel, including transportation and the storage itself, potentially overlapping with NRC oversight of those operations, according to Michael Layton, director of the regulator’s Division of Spent Fuel Management.
“Now with a centralized interim storage, we have movement from one regulatory environment in storage, into transportation and then back into storage regulatory environment,” Layton told the NRC commissioners during a Jan. 18 meeting. “So, we’re working very diligently in looking at those transitions and making sure that we’re going to be having a consistent regulatory environment as those canisters and casks move through that system. And that’s a lot of what the topical report will address.”
However, the NRC does not yet have greater insight into the details of the report, or even if DOE will release it.
A key factor in the Energy Department’s decision-making could be whether it gets the funds requested for fiscal 2018 to resume licensing of the planned Yucca Mountain radioactive waste repository in Nevada, Marc Dapas, director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, said during the meeting.
The Energy Department requested $110 million for the current budget year for Yucca Mountain licensing, which was halted during the Obama administration. The House has signed off on the funding, while the Senate has so far shown no willingness to approve the request. Congress has yet to pass a full-year budget, and the short-term spending plans that have sustained the federal government since the fiscal year began on Oct. 1 have provided no new funding for DOE or the NRC to work on Yucca licensing.
“Should that not come to pass with appropriations decisions, my understanding is that the Department of Energy would be looking at temporary storage in an interim storage facility,” according to Dapas. “And the topical safety analysis report is a means to that end of addressing various issues, and that would be submitted to NRC for review.”
He added: “Right now the reason they haven’t come forward with that is because they don’t know whether there will be a need for that.”
The TSAR is still being prepared and reviewed at DOE, according to Karla Olsen, spokeswoman for the department’s Office of Energy. “We will not have a comment on the report until it is published later this year.”
