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.
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
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