The Nuclear Regulatory Commission appears to have taken on the responsibility to complete the Yucca Mountain supplemental Enviromental Impact Statement needed to complete the Yucca licensing review, according to a letter sent from NRC Chair Allison Macfarlane to members of Congress yesterday. The NRC originally requested that the Department of Energy complete the EIS, but DOE indiciated it would only update the technical information for the NRC, avoiding doing the EIS itself. “The Commission has directed the staff to plan to develop and issue an EIS supplement,” Macfarlane said in her letter. “The work on the EIS supplement will not begin until at least the fall of 2014 when work on the SER is substantively complete and appropriate personnel are available to support the EIS supplement effort. At that time, staff will submit to the Commission its assessment of remaining Nuclear Waste Fund (NWF) funds and its proposed plan to complete the EIS supplement. The Commission will then provide direction on the allocation of funding to this task based on the staff’s updated assessment,” she said. The Commission had originally allocated $625,000 for the EIS, but more will be needed with the added workload. The NRC has approximately $11 million in funds to support the license review, but a substantial amount of that money is being spent on the completion of the Yucca Safety Evaluation Reports, expected to be finished in January of 2015.
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