RW Monitor
9/26/2014
IN THE NRC
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission posted its final ruling on the Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel, formerly known as Waste Confidence, in the Federal Register last week, beginning a 30-day countdown until the rule becomes official. The NRC’s proposed waste confidence ruling, released last year, found that spent fuel can be stored on site for 60 years past a reactor’s licensed life. When the NRC first issued a revised waste confidence rule in 2010, the Commission extended the length of time assumed to be safe for storage of spent fuel at a reactor site from 30 to 60 years. In 2012, though, a federal court found the NRC’s rule deficient and mandated an updated version, along with an environmental impact statement. In response, the NRC based its draft revised rule on a generic environmental impact statement that found the environmental impact of storing spent fuel on-site was small in most categories. This final rulemaking, though, removed language concerning a timeline for the availability of a repository after the Commission determined that was outside the NRC’s regulation jurisdiction.
IN THE INDUSTRY
AVANTech, Inc. announced this week that it has received a contract to provide wastewater treatment system to a plant in Mexico. AVANTECH will provide its AtrexTM system, to treat high conductivity liquid waste streams at the Laguna Verde Nuclear Station. “The addition of Mexico to our list of US and International sites with AtrexTM systems follows our long range growth plans,” AVANTech President Jim Braun said in a statement. “We have been providing equipment, liners and services to Mexico for three years through our exclusive representative Dragons de Veracruz S.A. de C.V. so this is a natural extension. In addition to water processing systems at US nuclear power and US DOE facilities, we now have radioactive liquid waste processing systems in Japan and China and are seeking to expand in Brazil, Canada, Korea and the UK.”
ON THE INTERNATIONAL FRONT
The Japanese government had hoped its decontamination efforts surrounding the Fukushima Daii-chi Power Plant would be done by now, but delays have forced the government to push back the target date to 2017, according to a Japan Times report from this week. The news outlet reported that “as of July, decontamination was completed in about 70 percent of schools, public facilities and farmland in the areas where municipal governments have responsibility, but about half of the planned decontamination for residential houses, and about 70 percent for roads and forests had yet to be finished, according to Environment Ministry data.” The reason for the slow decontamination is the lack of temporary storage sites, the Japan Times said.
