A regulatory domino fell Thursday at the plant where Westinghouse fabricates tritium producing burnable absorber rods for the National Nuclear Security Administration, clearing the way for cleanup of contaminated disposal lagoons on the South Carolina property.
On Thursday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued an exemption to commission regulations clearing U.S. Ecology to accept waste from the Westinghouse facility at a disposal site near Grand View, Idaho.
The waste from the Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility in Hopkins, S.C., contains special nuclear material and byproducts of fuel manufacturing. Ordinarily, U.S. Ecology would need an NRC license to accept that waste at Grand View, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote in a Federal Register notice.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2021 preliminarily recommended that the Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility be allowed to operate for another 40 years. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is counting on the plant, which also serves commercial customers, to fabricate tritium producing burnable absorber rods that will — after irradiation in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar reactors — provide the nuclear weapons agency with tritium to top off aging thermonuclear nuclear weapons.