Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
3/28/2014
Language referring to the availability of a repository "when needed" within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Waste Confidence rulemaking may change or be deleted altogether when the final ruling comes out, Andy Imboden of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards said during a Commission meeting late last week. The language within the rule that a repository would be available when needed drew the ire of many during the public comment period, with many citing the federal government’s failure to move Yucca Mountain forward as evidence to a lack of confidence in the government’s ability to site a repository. “At this time, in the current state of the directorate’s review, we believe that removing a specific policy statement regarding the timeline for repository availability from the role text may be warranted,” Imboden said. “This is mainly because it is not within the NRC’s responsibility or control to define when a repository might become available.”
Imboden also mentioned that the Waste Confidence rulemaking might adopt a new name as a way to more accurately reflect what the rulemaking accomplishes. Whereas previous Waste Confidence decisions were based on policy statements, this new rulemaking revolves around an environmental impact study, so the Waste Confidence name would be outdated. “At this point in our review, the staff believes the title of the rule warrants change,” Imboden said. “The staff does not make a specific recommendation for the new title right now, but as we move forward, we will be recommending a title change that accurately reflects what the rule does.”
The NRC’s proposed waste confidence ruling, released in June, found that spent fuel can be stored on site for 60 years past a reactor’s licensed life. 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. Last year, though, a federal court found the NRC’s rule deficient and mandated an updated version, along with an environmental impact statement. Because of adjudicatory matters before the Commission regarding the Waste Confidence rulemaking, the commissioners during last week’s meeting could not endorse the process or ask probing questions into the rulemaking, leaving the potential Commission direction to the staff unclear at this point.
Generic vs. Site-Specific?
While the availability of a repository remained a controversial subject during the meeting, a panel appearing before the Commission also discussed the site-specific versus generic analysis debate. John Sipos, a New York assistant attorney general, argued that a generic analysis fails to take into account large population corridors. “The Draft EIS is critically flawed because it attempts to analyze the consequences of a spent fuel pool accident generically for all facilities based on the modeled consequences of severe accidents at two nuclear power plants located in rural or less populated areas with markedly less building density,” Sapos said. “Accident consequence factors specific to the Indian Point facility, such as the surrounding population, building density, critical and unique infrastructure, and proximity to significant surface drinking water supplies have not been taken into account in the Draft EIS,” he said, referring to a nuclear plant in New York state.
Ronald Johnson, Tribal Council President for the Prairie Island Indian Community, also agreed that a site-specific approach would make more sense. “The Draft Environmental Impact Statement seeks to analyze severe consequences and potential environmental health impacts generically for all facilities,” Johnson said. “This makes no sense. We are not aware of another Tribal nation whose entire reservation homeland could be rendered uninhabitable by a spent fuel accident. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission must conduct at site-specific analysis of environmental impacts.”
Not the entire panel, though, agreed a generic approach failed to address the issue. Ellen Ginsberg, Vice President and General Counsel Secretary for the Nuclear Energy Institute, argued that the risks at any plant, like Indian Point, are the same regardless of the population characteristics. “There’s nothing unique about the risk of the actual incident or release, if you will, for Indian Point as opposed to anywhere else,” Ginsberg said. She argued that the highest risk of spent fuel fires is within the first few months that it is placed in the pool, so the risk decreases as time goes on for any site.
Institutional Control
The second major issue discussed by the panel discussed the idea of maintaining institutional controls in the future. The proposed Waste Confidence says spent fuel could be safely stored 60 years past a reactor’s license, and some argued that institutional control that far out into the future could not be assured. “I think it’s very difficult, and that one is getting out on thin ice when one says what we think we know today is going to take place is going to occur for the next 60, 100, 1,000 years. And I do think that’s where NEPA’s hard look can come into play,” Sapos said.
Ginsberg noted that the assumptions the NRC made in the proposed rule were consistent with other regulations. “During the short and long-term time frames, spent fuel storage systems will remain under NRC oversight,” Ginsberg said. “I would note that this assumption is consistent with current NRC regulations, such as 10 CFR Part 61. It was reasonable for the NRC to assume the existence of institutional controls, and the failure to establish a permanent repository is already a highly unlikely event which neither NEPA, nor the court requires a piling-on effect of additional conservatism by assuming the loss of institutional controls. Indeed, that would be a worst case and remote and speculative scenario beyond the reach of NEPA,” she said.