Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) reiterated her desire for the expedited transfer of spent fuel to dry cask storage while chastising the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for granting safety and security regulation exemptions for reactors undergoing decommissioning, during a hearing on nuclear reactor decommissioning held yesterday. Boxer has been vocal about the risk posed by over-storage of fuel rods in spent fuel pools at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, a site, she said, that is especially vulnerable due to its close proximity to a fault line. “Make no mistake—the reactors may be shut down, but the risks of an accident or attack have not gone away,” Boxer said at the hearing. “While NRC Chairman Allison Macfarlane co-authored a paper that found that the long-term land-contamination consequences of a spent fuel fire ‘could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl,’ NRC has taken no action thus far to ensure appropriate levels of protection are in place.”
Boxer, along with Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), have proposed legislation that would call for the transfer of spent fuel to dry cask storage before any safety or security exemptions could be granted to a decommissioning site. The NRC is currently considering whether it should call for the expedited transfer of spent fuel to dry cask storage as part of its lessons-learned review from the Fukushima-Daiichi disaster. The NRC staff determined that only a marginal safety benefit would come from the transfer, and the benefit did not outweigh the large costs. At a Commission meeting held earlier this year, a majority of the commissioners indicated through their comments that they supported the staff’s findings.
