The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will vote on the final rulemaking for the Waste Confidence update today amid calls for a delay to deny Commissioner William Magwood’s vote on the issue. 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, in what appears to be an attempt to count Magwood’s vote towards the final decision-making before his departure to the Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA). A group of 34 environmental activist organizations, which unsuccessfully tried to obtain Magwood’s resignation and retroactive recusal for his involvement with the NEA while still holding office in the NRC, sent a letter last week to NRC Chairman Allison Macfarlane, urging her to delay the vote so that Magwood could not participate. The group argues in their letter to Macfarlane that Magwood’s compromised status would put a cloud of doubt around the vote, but Macfarlane declined to comment and the vote will go on as planned.
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 rule-making 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.
