Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
7/18/2014
Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Allison Macfarlane joined industry stakeholders this week in calling for a rulemaking to better define the decommissioning process for commercial reactors during a Commission briefing on nuclear plant decommissioning. With the recent surge of plants entering premature shutdown, the NRC’s lack of regulations to show the difference between an operating site and a decommissioning site has led to a slew of exemption requests, some of which have drawn the ire of Senate lawmakers. “I think we need to do rulemaking,” Macfarlane said during the briefing. “These reactors have been operating for more than four decades. What are we doing? Why don’t we have a process that is clear? Clearly, there is a lot of confusion; not just on the public’s part, but also on the licensee’s part.” The NRC originally began a rulemaking process 15 years ago to update the Commission’s policies on decommissioning sites, but the fallout from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks put the rulemaking on the back burner.
Macfarlane’s call for a decommissioning rulemaking was echoed by industry representatives. Dominion’s Senior Vice President of Nuclear Operations Daniel Stoddard indicated that the confusion and inefficiency of the NRC when reviewing the Kewaunee exemption requests wasted valuable resources that could have went elsewhere. “The bottom-line result of limited guidance confusion regarding applicability of specific regulations and questions regarding the use of precedence is a significant additional interface to travel time, and review time and resources are required to deal with exemption requests—time and resources that could be devoted to activities that have greater safety significance,” Stoddard said. “A measure of this resource requirement could be seen in review fees for license amendment requests and exemption requests for Kewaunee that were in excess of $1 million per year. That represents not just an expenditure of trust funds, but it also represents an opportunity cost for the NRC staff and the licensee staff.”
Not everyone was as convinced, however, that a rulemaking would solve the problem. Commissioner Kristine Svinicki warned that rulemaking processes could be cumbersome, and with each site presenting unique decommissioning problems that need to be solved, it could result in the loss of vital flexibility. “Rulemaking is really an art form.” Svinicki said. “It’s like writing statute. It has to be clearly written, and although it’s clear to see that that suggestion of having part 50 issue analyses have some consideration of decommissioning, it might be really clumsy to do. We need to think about that a little bit. We need to keep the appropriate flexibility.”
Exemption Debate Continues
The briefing also presented another round of debate on the appropriateness of exemptions at the sites, especially for emergency preparedness and security regulations. Critics to the approvals pointed to the on/off nature of the exemptions that many fear decreases safety, a point made by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), who have introduced legislation that would deny exemption requests until all spent fuel has been moved to dry cask storage. “We do not agree with the blanket exemption from on/off, like one day you had full emergency preparedness mode, and the next you are exempted after the 15 months of the fuel being in the pool,” Vermont Department of Public Service Chris Reccia said. “A blanket exemption across the board, the way the staff has proposed, in my mind is not helpful. And I would ask that, really, for exemptions of this, particularly until rulemaking is established, I think state input should be a consideration for the Commission in granting those exemptions.” Reccia favored a gradual decrease in regulations so as not to introduce dramatic change at the site.
While the Nuclear Energy Institute’s Senior Director of Radiation Safety and Environmental Protection Ralph Anderson argued that the exemptions were necessary, he did indicate the industry could do a better job of communicating the process to the public. “By definition, when you request an exemption in these processes associated with decommissioning, you are reducing the number of things you are doing, and you are reducing the number of people that are doing them, and you are reducing the extent of instrumentation and equipment that you have available to you, so everything is perceived as not having to do things anymore,” Anderson said. “What I find missing in communication is, what is left [after the exemption]. I think the impression has been created that, for instance, someone broadly speaks about emergency preparedness exemptions, and the conclusion people draw from that is, ‘Oh, you’re not going to have emergency preparedness anymore,’ when in fact you have a very robust emergency response capability for onsite that is totally commensurate with the analyzed risk associated with the defueled shutdown plant.”
Anderson’s point was reiterated by David Vitter, Chairman of the San Onofre Community Engagement Panel. Vitter pleaded with the Commission to better explain itself in layman’s terms when dealing with decommissioning communities because they lack the background knowledge to fully understand what is happening at the site. “I would urge you to please help us in these communities understand with some plain English articulation of what the strategy is as to what is going on, because the community right now just has no idea what the actual strategy is from a regulatory point of view,” Vitter said. “They don’t really know what happens, what’s important, what is not important, and it would be very helpful to try and articulate that, because absent that articulation, people’s views about this strategy are basically refracted through their views of trust in the regulatory institutions.”
Community Engagement Panels a Requirement?
The Commissioners also discussed at the meeting the role of a community engagement panel in the decommissioning process, and whether one should be required by rulemaking. With increasing stakeholder engagement in the process, members of the panel indicated that a community group was vital to the success of a decommissioning project. President and CEO of Yankee Rowe and Connecticut Yankee Wayne Norton, who oversaw the decommissioning of those two sites, agreed on the importance of a community panel. “Getting early alignment with your stakeholders on your vision, where are you going to take this project, and what is the definition of end state, is extremely critical,” Norton said. “The other piece to this is that engagement is a continuous one. Once you get the buy-in, you are not done. Things change. These projects are very dynamic, and you’re going to encounter things that you don’t expect and you need to continue to remain engaged. At Maine, we instituted a Community Advisory Panel right out of the gate, and it bode very well for us.”
Macfarlane speculated as to whether a requirement for a community panel should be written into regulation, but was rebuffed by members of the panel who saw the rulemaking as too constrictive to communities. “My instinct right now is that requiring this would actually probably be harmful in the sense that you would then have to write the rule in some way, and I think each of these different communities have had a different kind of relationship with these plants, and different kinds of stakeholder,” Vitter said. “I don’t know if we know enough right now to write the rule.”
SAFESTOR Under Review?
Macfarlane also indicated a willingness to re-look at the reasoning behind the SAFESTOR regulations, in what could be a subtle beginning to changes behind the decommissioning process. Macfarlane questioned a panel of NRC staff members responsible for decommissioning activities on whether improvements in techniques have reduced worker dose, which is a fact, according to Bruce Watson, chief of the NRC’s reactor decommissioning branch of the Federal and State Materials and Environmental Management Programs. “The dismantling techniques have improved dramatically,” Watson said during the briefing. “I think at Maine Yankee they used a slurry of grip-blasting for cutting metal underwater, that is now a mechanical process done underwater. That is being done at Zion. All of these contribute to lowering dose. It does not contribute to the minimization of waste, but it does significantly lower the dose.”
Macfarlane responded by saying, “That makes me think that maybe we should be re-thinking these SAFESTOR numbers, if they are truly based on protecting workers. I would be interested in re-visiting this a bit, if we could learn more about this.”
Under the SAFESTOR regulation, reactor sites sit ‘moth-balled’ for a period up to 60 years to enable radioactive materials to cool. The reduction in radioactivity results in a decreased dose to workers dismantling the plant, as well as a reduction in waste material needed for disposal. Currently, there are 11 sites with reactors in SAFESTOR. Kewaunee and Crystal River, both of whom have shutdown in the last year, are among those 11 sites.
