A proposed rulemaking for decommissioning nuclear power plants doesn’t go the distance to ensure a balance of safety and efficiency, one of the Senate’s most outspoken nuclear critics told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week.

In a letter to NRC chair Christopher Hanson dated Friday, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) sounded the alarm about the agency’s 2018 proposed decommissioning rulemaking, which he said “misses an historic opportunity to implement specific regulations that would ensure that local communities are protected and decommissioned nuclear plants are as safe as possible.”

Markey raised concerns about the proposed rulemaking’s central thrust: to free nuclear power operators from extraneous regulatory procedures by reducing license amendment and exemption requests that would no longer be relevant as a plant proceeds through decommissioning. 

The NRC’s proposal sought to reduce regulatory hurdles for decommissioning funding assurances, physical security, emergency preparedness and low-level waste transportation. It would also allow operators to access money held in plant decommissioning trust funds for spent fuel management without needing a greenlight from NRC.

“The NRC is not only proposing to codify the system of exemptions but also to remove NRC oversight of them — a step backward that prioritizes ease for industry over safety for communities,” Markey wrote in his letter. In the 2018 proposal, commission staff said that getting rid of the exemption requirements would make the decommissioning process “more efficient, open, and predictable by reducing the [plant operator’s] reliance on licensing actions.”

Markey also took issue in his Friday letter with NRC’s assertion in its proposal that spent fuel from decommissioned nuclear reactors would remain onsite for 16 years before being transferred to an offsite facility or geologic repository. That figure “seriously underestimates” how long it takes to dismantle a nuclear reactor, Markey said. It also ignores the “numerous” political and financial obstacles to establishing any sort of consolidated storage for spent fuel, he said.

This isn’t the first time Markey has objected to the proposed rulemaking. The senator submitted a near carbon-copy of Friday’s correspondence to former NRC chair Kristine Svinicki in 2018. 

The proposed rule, which NRC directed its staff to start working on in 2014, has been the subject of some delay. Although the final rule was supposed to be ready in 2019, the commission has said it will be published in October of this year.

“I share the NRC’s goals of providing a safe, effective, and efficient decommissioning process for nuclear plants,” Markey said Friday, “but I am concerned that this draft rule falls short.”