The members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday received a proposed package of rules for commercial nuclear power reactors making the transition from operations to decommissioning.
“The proposed rule package was signed out by the Office of Executive Director and sent to the Office of the Secretary yesterday, so … the Commission has it,” NRC spokesman David McIntyre said by email Tuesday.
The document will be made public within 10 business days, McIntyre said.
The timeline for the commission to approve the document is not known, Meena Khanna, who heads the NRC’s Reactor Rulemaking and Project Management Branch, said at a nuclear industry event last week. However, in a schedule of rulemaking activities posted to the NRC website on Thursday, the agency forecast the proposed rule being published on July 31.
The rulemaking is intended to reduce the need for nuclear plant operators to request regulatory exemptions or amendments to their licenses for facilities that pose a reduced security and emergency risk once they are no longer operational and have been defueled.
Late last year, NRC staff completed the list of areas for which there was “sufficient justification” for development of new regulations. These were: emergency preparedness, physical security, cyber security, drug and alcohol testing, training requirements for certified fuel handlers, decommissioning trust funds, financial protection requirements and indemnity agreements, and application of the backfit rule.
Staff recommended issuing guidance, but not new regulations, in other areas such as the role of state and local governments in the decommissioning process.
After the commission rules on the rules package, it would be made available for a roughly 75-day public comment period, Khanna said last week. Comments would be used to ready the final document, which should go to the commission for a vote in fall 2019 – the newly released rulemaking schedule lists a specific date of Oct. 7. It would become effective in early 2020.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the end of March had $464,544 remaining in its available balance from the fund that pays for its licensing activities for the planned Yucca Mountain radioactive waste repository in Nevada, according to the latest update to Congress.
The agency spent $42,506 of its Nuclear Waste Fund carryover during the month. Of that, $23,217 represented “Trailing costs” from a Feb. 27-28 meeting on options for reconstituting the Licensing Support Network (LSN), the database of more than 3 million documents related to the NRC’s adjudication of the Department of Energy license application for Yucca Mountain. The LSN was retired, and the documents shifted to the NRC’s online records library, after the Obama administration in 2010 canceled all work on Yucca Mountain.
Of the remaining spending in March, $18,185 went toward knowledge management reports and $1,104 toward other support costs chargeable to Nuclear Waste Fund funds, says the report, which was posted to the NRC website on Monday.
The NRC had a $13.5 million carryover balance from the Nuclear Waste Fund when a federal judge in August 2013 ordered the agency to resume the Yucca Mountain licensing proceeding. It has since then spent just over $13 million, primarily on completing a safety evaluation report for Yucca Mountain, a supplement to the environmental impact statement for the application, and moving the LSN documents into the Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS).
Of the total remaining balance of $504,220 as of March, $39,676 was unspent but already obligated.
The Trump administration wants to resume licensing for Yucca Mountain. For the current budget year, Congress rejected the NRC’s request of $30 million to restart adjudication of the DOE license application. The regulator is seeking nearly $48 million for that purpose in fiscal 2019, which begins on Oct. 1.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has scheduled two more public scoping meetings to help guide its environmental review of Holtec International’s license application for a consolidated interim storage facility in New Mexico for spent nuclear reactor fuel.
The NRC staff meetings in Gallup and Albuquerque follow similar meetings in the southeastern New Mexico cities of Carlsbad, Hobbs, and Roswell. The events will allow the public to comment on “the appropriate scope of issues to be considered in, and the content of the” environmental impact statement for the Holtec facility, according to the NRC announcements for both meetings.
The EIS is a key part of the full technical review of Holtec’s application, which the agency initiated on Feb. 28.
The Camden, N.J., energy technology company has applied for a license to store up to 8,680 metric tons of used fuel now held on-site a nuclear power plants across the country. The facility’s anticipated maximum capacity would exceed 100,000 metric tons of waste.
The NRC is expected to complete its technical review of the application in 2020, with the commission itself having final say on approval of the license.
The next scoping meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. May 21 at the Gallup Downtown Conference Center. That will be followed by a 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. session the next day at the Crown Plaza Albuquerque hotel, Southeast Ballroom.
No further scoping meetings are planned. However, the agency has extended the end of the public comment period from May 29 to July 30. Interested parties can submit comments at www.regulations.gov, under Docket ID NRC-2018-0052.
From The Wires
From The Hill: Energy Secretary Rick Perry says the Defense Production Act could be used to sustain nuclear and coal power plants.
From the Washington Examiner: Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Kevin McIntyre appears skeptical of that idea.
From World Nuclear News: The United Kingdom’s Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy is taking public input on proposed relaxation of certain regulations for nuclear facilities nearing the end of decommissioning and environmental remediation.
