Happy Friday, nuke-watchers. Before you unplug for this Memorial Day weekend, here are some other stories from across the civilian nuclear power space that RadWaste Monitor was tracking this week.
Nuke credits, waste on the agenda for Granholm’s visit to CT power plant
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm last week visited Connecticut’s only operating nuclear power plant, where she spoke about key issues facing the Department of Energy’s nuclear energy policy.
Granholm joined Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) at Millstone Power Station May 20 to talk, among other things, about DOE’s recently-unveiled civil nuclear credits program, the energy secretary said in a Tweet. The agency’s nuclear bailout “will allow other nuclear plants like [Millstone] to be preserved – providing thousands of good-paying jobs,” Granholm said.
DOE is currently allowing nuclear plant operators with facilities facing imminent closure to apply for the first round of credits under the roughly $6 billion carve-out authorized over five years by November’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The agency last week extended the deadline for bids to July 5.
Granholm also used her time at Millstone to stump for a nuclear waste solution, NBC Connecticut reported last week. “It is important for us as a nation to say we are finding a place to store nuclear waste in one place so that communities are not bearing this responsibility,” she said.
The energy department has made some headway in recent months on its latest attempt to site an interim storage facility for the nation’s roughly 80,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. Between November and March DOE collected public input on how it should go about siting such a facility. The agency is now reviewing those comments and preparing a funding opportunity for interested host communities — an opportunity that should be ready by early fall, Granholm has said.
DOE publishes environmental impact statement for VTR
The Department of Energy last week released its environmental safety review for a proposed advanced test reactor.
In the Versatile Test Reactor’s (VTR) environmental impact statement, published May 20, DOE recommends constructing the sodium-cooled pool reactor at a “suitable” agency site — in particular, at either Idaho National Laboratory (INL) or Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Fuel for the VTR could be fabricated either at INL or at the Savannah River site, DOE said.
Agency staff prefer the reactor be built at INL, the report said, where it would be constructed near the site’s Materials and Fuels Complex. Spent fuel from the VTR would be treated on-site, a process designed to “condition and transform the spent nuclear fuel into a form that would meet the acceptance criteria for a future permanent repository,” DOE said. In the meantime, that waste would be kept on a storage pad to be built at INL.
The VTR’s environmental impact statement comes as DOE in March requested around $45 million in federal funding for the project as part of its 2023 fiscal year budget request. Congress refused to fund the VTR in its bipartisan omnibus spending package for 2022.
NuScale SMR safety review good to go after update, NRC says
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week announced that it had smoothed over some internal debate on a safety review for a proposed advanced nuclear reactor project and that the final report is now ready.
NRC staff resolved a “differing professional opinion” regarding an earthquake safety analysis for NuScale’s proposed small modular reactor (SMR) design, the agency said in a Tweet Friday. According to a May 13 letter to NRC operations director Daniel Dorman, staff added extra documentation on their review process for determining that the SMR would be able to withstand an earthquake.
Dorman in February raised concerns about NRC’s NuScale review, questioning their basis for the earthquake analysis, the letter said. The operations director concluded that staff’s methodology “was not sufficiently documented” and that the agency should go back and show its work.
Oregon-based NuScale, in which Fluor is a leading investor, is working with a number of partners to deploy its proposed SMR technology. The company in 2021 signed an agreement with Grant County, Wash., to explore advanced reactors. NuScale is also working with a public utility commission in Utah to develop an SMR facility by 2029.
