The Nuclear Regulatory Commission tentatively plans to vote on the final rulemaking for the Waste Confidence update on Aug. 26, according to the Commission’s online meeting schedule. The NRC Staff released the draft final rulemaking at the end of July, which would make this affirmation vote a quick turn-around from the Commission. It appears the reasoning behind this quick turnaround is to enable Commissioner William Magwood’s vote to count towards the final decision-making. Magwood announced earlier this summer that he would be leaving the Commission at the end of August to take over as the Director-General of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA). The NRC declined to comment on the tentative vote date.
The NRC’s proposed waste confidence ruling, released last year, 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. In 2012, though, a federal court found the NRC’s rule deficient and mandated an updated version, along with an environmental impact statement. In response, the NRC based its draft revised rule on a generic environmental impact statement that found the environmental impact of storing spent fuel on-site was small in most categories. The recently released draft final rulemaking from the NRC Staff did not include any major changes to the rule, although a timeline of repository availability and safety considerations were removed from the rule.
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