Michele Kearney's Nuclear Wire

Major Energy and Environmental News and Commentary affecting the Nuclear Industry.

Friday, July 6, 2012

i-Nuclear update: Court overturns NRC 'waste confidence rule' but officials say there is limited immediate effect

i-NUCLEAR

Court overturns NRC ‘waste confidence’ rule, but officials say there is limited immediate effect

by I-Nuclear
A US circuit court ruling last month that could block the issuance of new licenses for new US reactor construction and plant license renewals is expected to have little immediate effect, NRC officials have said.
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out the 2010 revision to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s waste confidence rule.
In the 2010 revision, the NRC stated that a final repository for nuclear waste would be available “when necessary” (it was “by 2025” in the original language of the rule).
The 2010 revision also extended from 30 years to 60 years the period of time that spent nuclear fuel and waste could be safely stored on reactor sites after the end of the plants’ operating lives.
“The Commission apparently has no long term plan other than hoping for a geologic repository,” the court said. “If government continues to fail in its quest to establish one, then SNF [spent nuclear fuel] will seemingly be stored on site at nuclear plants on a permanent basis. The Commission can and must assess the potential environmental effects of such a failure,” the court ruled.
The court “vacated” the 2010 revisions and required that the NRC perform a “more thorough analysis” for the conclusions it drew in its waste confidence rule – either in the form of a full environmental impact statement or a ‘finding of no significant impact’ under an environmental assessment.
“While the [NRC] Staff agrees that no final decision to grant a combined license (“COL”), operating license, or renewed operating license should be made in the captioned proceedings until the NRC has appropriately dispositioned the issues remanded by the court, there are no imminent final, initial or renewed reactor licensing decisions,” NRC staff wrote in response to the court decision.
As it happens, NRC is in the midst of extending its waste confidence rule by 200 years and as part of that action is already planning to conduct an environmental impact statement, which could be used to address the defects found by the court in its existing waste confidence rule.
The outgoing NRC Chairman Gregory B. Jaczko said July 5 he thought the agency would have “little difficulty” in responding to the decision by the court to throw out the 2010 revision to the NRC’s waste confidence rule.
“When we issued the [2010] waste confidence decision, the Commission asked the staff to go forward with an environment review, looking at a longer timeframe about what kinds of challenges they could see with spent fuel and spent fuel storage,” Jaczko said in a speech.
“This court decision may just change the timeframe and the timing, and accelerate some of that work. Ultimately, I believe this is an issue that the Commission will have little difficulty addressing,” Jaczko said.
In January, the NRC published a report, entitled “Background and Preliminary Assumptions for an Environmental Impact Statement – Long-term Waste Confidence Update” for public comment (iNM, Feb. ’12, 11).
The report is a starting point for a new revision to the waste confidence rule and explicitly includes the prospect for an environmental impact statement (EIS) – a process that could stretch out to 2019.
The staff plans to develop the EIS to analyze the impacts of storage from approximately the middle of this century for a period of 200 years.
The staff selected mid-century as the starting point for the impacts analysis because it represents the time when some spent fuel will begin to reach the minimum storage periods accounted for in the current (and now vacated) waste confidence rule, which is 60 years after expiration of the licensed life of the reactor.
The oldest spent fuel will have been stored for about 100 years by the middle of the century.
The staff selected a 200-year span for the EIS because that is approximately when this oldest fuel will approach 300 years of storage.
The 300-year period is the timeframe being used by NRC and others in technical analyses to identify spent fuel aging issues, NRC said.—David Stellfox
I-Nuclear | July 6, 2012 at 11:59 am | Categories: geological disposal, NRC, nuclear waste, Regulation | URL: http://wp.me/p22dAl-lz

No comments:

Post a Comment