A group of senators, including Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), introduced three pieces of legislation yesterday that would enhance and expand safety and security regulations at decommissioning reactor sites and the storage of spent nuclear fuel at nuclear plants. The senators, who each has a commercial reactor plant in their state, with Boxer and Sanders each dealing with a decommissioning site as well, have been vocal in the past concerning stakeholder involvement with the decommissioning process as well as with exemptions granted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to safety and security regulations at the sites. Two of the three bills, the Safe and Secure Decommissioning Act of 2014 and the Nuclear Plant Decommissioning Act of 2014, deals with increasing safety at the decommissioning site while increasing local stakeholder involvement in the planning process. “Every state with a nuclear power plant has a strong interest in how that plant is decommissioned,” Sanders said in a statement. “This is about making sure that states and local communities can play a meaningful role in a decision that has enormous economic, environmental, and community impacts.” Boxer added: “In my home state of California, the San Onofre nuclear plant has closed permanently, and this legislation will help guarantee that this facility, and others like it, are safely decommissioned and are no longer a liability for local communities.”
The third bill, the Dry Cask Storage Act of 2014, calls for the removal of spent fuel from pools to dry cask storage as soon as the fuel is able. The reactors would have to gain NRC-approval for a plan that would require the safe removal of spent nuclear fuel from the spent fuel pools and place that spent fuel into dry cask storage within 7 years of the time the plan is submitted to the NRC. “Experts agree that a spent fuel pool accident could have consequences that are every bit as bad as an accident at an operating reactor,” Markey said in a statement. “In Massachusetts, Pilgrim nuclear plant’s spent fuel pool contains nearly four times more radioactive waste than it was originally designed to hold. Nuclear waste must be moved to safer storage now before the next nuclear disaster occurs.” The NRC is currently considering the expedited transfer of spent fuel to dry cask storage as part of its lessons learned from the Fukushima-Daiichi disaster, but in a Commission meeting held earlier this year, most of the commissioners indicated they were against the transfer requirement, saying the cost of transfer greatly outweighed the marginal safety enhancement added. The bill includes funding to help the reactor implement the transfer.
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