The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is giving the state of South Carolina more time to submit new data and input on the license renewal of Westinghouse Electric’s Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility.
The formal 30-day comment period on the federal agency’s draft environmental assessment for the renewal application ended on Nov. 27, 2019. On Jan. 13, the NRC rejected a request from the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) to either extend the comment period through March or to suspend its proposed finding that renewing the license would generate no significant environmental impact.
However, the NRC will give the state agency alone until March 27 to file comments on the draft environmental assessment for the 40-year license renewal.
The Department of Health and Environmental Control in November said it needed the additional time to incorporate data from 40 groundwater monitoring wells dug at the Westinghouse property last summer.
The state is also waiting on results of new testing on sediment from the Upper and Lower Sunset Lakes, where elevated levels of uranium concentrations have been found in preliminary findings, according to a Nov. 26 letter to the NRC from G. Kendall Taylor, director of DHEC’s Site Assessment, Remediation, and Revitalization Division. Those concentrations could be the result of a 1971 lagoon failure at the plant that caused 1.5 million gallons of wastewater to pour into Upper Sunset Lake, according to DHEC.
The state expects in February to receive a full report from Westinghouse on the well data, DHEC spokeswoman Laura Renwick said by email last week. She did not offer a schedule for Westinghouse to submit findings from its sediment testing.
Westinghouse in 2014 applied for a 40-year license renewal for the 550,000-square-foot nuclear fuel production plant. The current operations license expires on Sept. 30, 2027.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission initially issued its environmental assessment and finding of no significant impact in June 2018. It subsequently revoked those following a series of mishaps at the facility, but affirmed its earlier findings in a new draft environmental assessment in October.
