SAVANNAH, GA – The Supreme Court will probably rule by July 3 on whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has authority to license privately-held interim storage facilities, a leading nuclear industry lawyer said during the 19th Radwaste Summit.
That was the assessment offered Tuesday by Michael McBride, a partner with Van Ness Feldman during the opening day of Exchange Monitor’s Radwaste Summit. This event was held at Savannah, Ga. McBride appeared virtually from another location.
The high court heard oral arguments in March centered around whether NRC has the right to issue the license to Orano USA and Waste Control Specialists, to develop an interim spent fuel facility in West Texas.
The case was not among the handful of decisions handed down by the Supreme Court Thursday.
“As the NRC sees it, there is no legal distinction between at-reactor storage and away-from-reactor storage licenses because the statute gives NRC the authority to issue ‘possession’ licenses regardless of what other may exist or have existed at the location proposed,” McBride said in his presentation.
Regardless of what the Supreme Court decides, it will not have a “direct” effect on the Department of Energy’s efforts to cite its own interim spent fuel storage facilities, said Erica Bickford, director of the Office of Storage and Transportation within DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy. No matter what the high court decides, a privately-held interim storage site will not relieve DOE’s liability for taking possession of spent fuel currently stored at nuclear power reactors across the country, Bickford said.
“Right now all options are on the table,” said Marla Morales, director of what is now called the Office of Collaboration-Based Siting within DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy. DOE under the new administration will continue to look for willing host communities, she said. Allowing a spent fuel storage facility to be built locally could be an economic game-changer for some counties, she said.
Under nuclear executive orders issued May 23 by the Donald Trump administration, the relevant federal agencies now have less than 240 days to issue a report on what should be done on issues like interim storage and permanent disposal of high-level radioactive waste, said Bruce Montgomery. Montgomery is a Nuclear Energy Institute director for decommissioning and spent fuel.
The executive orders provide the nuclear sector with both great promise and peril, said Montgomery and other speakers.
“How we can manage the executive order-driven changes in nuclear regulation without reversing recent forward progress,” Montgomery said. “It doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy.”
This is especially true for NRC, which even before the executive orders, was already working hard to overhaul and streamline procedures under the Advance Act passed by Congress last year, said Robert Lewis, deputy executive director of operations for NRC.
NRC has adopted a new mission statement and a new project management mindset, said Lewis, but it is going to be tough to meet the quick-licensing timelines and calls for major overhaul, mandated by the Trump orders.
NRC already has three advanced reactor license applications pending and plenty more on the way, said Lewis, who is set to retire at the end of the month.
NRC, DOE and other key nuclear federal agencies are facing a “brain drain” issue partly because of the number of veteran hands departing the government through early retirements or buyouts, said Frank Rusco. Rusco is director of Natural Resources and Environmental and Energy issues with the Government Accountability Office.
Larry Camper, a retired NRC executive and senior nuclear safety consultant, said the executive orders are driven by multiple factors, including rising electricity demand and the design for carbon-free energy. As much as anything, however, they are the administration’s response to a surge in nuclear power plant construction by China, he added.
