The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is waiting to see whether the Department of Energy will issue a topical safety analysis report (TSAR) on temporary storage of spent commercial nuclear reactor fuel, officials said last week.
The TSAR would be expected to address technical issues with consolidated interim storage of used fuel, which could be important to the NRC given its role in regulating current storage at nuclear sites and any future holding facilities. However, the NRC does not yet know yet what technical issues might be featured in the report, or even if DOE will release it.
A key factor in the Energy Department’s decision-making could be whether it gets the funds requested for fiscal 2018 to resume licensing of the permanent repository for spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountainin Nevada, Marc Dapas, director of the NRC’s Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, told the agency commissioners during a meeting Thursday.
“Should that not come to pass with appropriations decisions, my understanding is that the Department of Energy would be looking at temporary storage in an interim storage facility in the topical safety analysis report as a means to that end of addressing various issues, and that would be submitted to NRC for review,” Dapas said. “Right now the reason they haven’t come forward with that is because they don’t know whether there will be a need for that.”
The TSAR is still being prepared and reviewed at DOE, according to Karla Olsen, spokeswoman for the department’s Office of Energy. “We will not have a comment on the report until it is published later this year.”
Two companies have filed NRC license applications to build and operate consolidated interim storage facilities. Waste Control Specialists filed its paperwork in April 2016 for a facility in West Texas with capacity for up to 40,000 metric tons of waste, but last year asked the regulator to suspend the review. Meanwhile, the agency is still conducting the acceptance review for Holtec International’s March 2017 application for a facility in New Mexico with a 120,000-metric-ton capacity.
