A group of senators, including Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Ranking Member Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), re-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 have a commercial reactor plant in their state, introduced the bills last session, but they did not see any movement. Two of the three bills, the Safe and Secure Decommissioning Act of 2015 and the Nuclear Plant Decommissioning Act of 2015, deal with increasing safety at the decommissioning site while increasing local stakeholder involvement in the planning process. “In my home state of California, the San Onofre nuclear plant closed permanently,” Boxer said in statement. “Our legislation will ensure that the San Onofre facility and others like it across the nation are safely decommissioned and that the surrounding communities are protected.”
The third bill, the Dry Cask Storage Act of 2015, calls for the removal of spent fuel from pools to dry cask storage as soon as the fuel is ready for removal. 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 seven years of the time the plan is submitted to the NRC. “An accident at an overstuffed spent fuel pool like the one at Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Massachusetts would be as disastrous as an accident at an operating nuclear reactor,” Markey said in a statement. “Pilgrim’s spent fuel pool contains nearly four times more radioactive waste than it was originally designed to hold. We need to ensure dangerous nuclear waste is moved to safer storage before a nuclear disaster occurs.”
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