The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Friday locked in its fee collection levels for the current federal fiscal year.
The agency collects 90% of its annual budget through annual and service fees, with the rest appropriated by Congress.
Lawmakers set the NRC’s budget at $855.6 million for fiscal 2021, which ends on Sept. 30, according to according to a June 19 Federal Register notice on fee recovery. That is down by $55.4 million from the preceding year.
Certain operations are excluded from the fee-take requirement. For 2020 that totals $46.6 million, covering $15.5 million for preparing the regulatory framework for advanced nuclear reactors, $14.5 million for international activities, $14.1 million for “generic” homeland security operations, $1.3 million for Waste Incidental to Reprocessing work, and $1.2 million for NRC inspector general services for the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
That leaves $728.1 million to be collected in fees, compared to $780.8 million for fiscal 2019, the Federal Register notice says. Annual fees for licensees would provide $507.9 million, with the remaining $220.2 coming from service fees.
In total, that is down by $400,000 from the $728.5 million in fees proposed in February. At the time, the regulator projected recovering $497.9 million in annual fees and $230.6 million in service fees.
The NRC’s professional hourly rate for services is $279, $1 more than the rate for fiscal 2019. “The slight increase in the FY 2020 professional hourly rate is primarily due to the anticipated decline in number of mission-direct [full-time equivalent employees] compared to FY 2019,” according to the Federal Register notice. That is due to a number of factors, the agency said, including the retirements of three nuclear power reactors and the cancellation of the NRC-regulated Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility project at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The owners of operational nuclear power reactors will pay by far the most in annual fees, $439 million for fiscal 2020.
Yearly collections from spent fuel storage and decommissioning licensees will total $37.9 million. That grows $2.3 million from $35.6 million last year, due to factors including inspections for four reactors heading into decommissioning.
