New Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Alison Macfarlane said Tuesday that she intends to draw more attention to the convergence of geology and nuclear issues. “I want to work on that,” she told reporters at the National Press Club. “Geology clearly matters. If that wasn’t one of the main lessons of Fukushima, I don’t know what was. … It matters that we keep up to date with geologic knowledge.” She also said she plans to focus more energy on the back end of the fuel cycle. “The back end of the fuel cycle matters. We should be thinking about it all the time, it shouldn’t be an afterthought. And I feel that until now it has been an afterthought.” Prior to her appointment to the NRC, Mcfarlane worked for two years with the Obama administration’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. With the Department of Energy poised to hand in its report on the Blue Ribbon Commission’s January recommendations, Macfarlane said the commission’s work was important and should be used by Congress to create policy. “I don’t think it should be relegated to the dustbin,” she said. Removing spent nuclear fuel from decommissioned sites, where the fuel is the only thing that remains of a former power plant, was one of the top recommendations. Macfarlane said, “Congress needs to set a policy, working with the administration, so they can provide guidance to the NRC on how to deal with this material.”
Addressing the waste confidence issue, Macfarlane said NRC staff has sent a paper to the commission outlining options they may pursue to justify the decision. The NRC commissioners voted in 2010 to approve an updated Waste Confidence Decision, which stated that the NRC believed storing waste on nuclear power plant sites was safe for up to 60 years—double the previous waste confidence decision time period of 30 years. But a U.S. Circuit Court overturned the 2010 decision in June, saying the commissioners had not adequately analyzed potential environmental consequences of the determination. Earlier this month, the NRC agreed not to finalize the extension of any nuclear plant licenses, or any new nuclear plant licenses, until the waste confidence issue was resolved. “Staff has sent a paper to the commission giving us a number of options on how to go forward, with timing, and in general the commission feels we should work on this as efficiently as possible, but we haven’t settled on a number yet.”