NRC TO VOTE ON YUCCA RECORDS, HEAR UPDATE ON PART 61 REVISION

The Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners will hold a public meeting today to vote on a staff petition to keep the NRC from acting as steward to the millions of Yucca Mountain licensing documents, and to hear from the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards on the effort to incorporate site-specific performance assessments into 10 CFR Part 61.

The Licensing Support Network, the searchable public access to the NRC’s Yucca Mountain geologic repository licensing proceedings, shut down Aug. 5, and an Atomic Safety Licensing Board Order earlier this year directed NRC staff to preserve all the documents in PDF format—among other archiving duties—by Aug. 31. However, staff submitted a petition to the Commissioners saying that archiving the approximately 3,692,000 documents from all parties in the licensing proceedings would put enormous strain on NRC resources, and would cause the agency “irreparable harm.”

The ACRS, and in particular Nuclear Materials Subcommittee Chairman Mike Ryan, have been openly critical of NRC staff’s proposed Site Specific Analysis Rulemaking, which would address the disposal requirements for unique waste streams such as depleted uranium and blended waste by incorporating new requirements to dispose of those wastes. The changes include setting a disposal facility’s period of performance within 20,000 years, and setting a 500 millirem annual dose for inadvertent intruders. In slides submitted in preparation for today’s meeting, Ryan asks the Commission not to adopt staff’s proposed SSA rulemaking language, and to take a different approach in regulating DU and other unique waste streams’ disposal.