![]( "feerule")
The NRC recently
amended
its regulations to reflect the fees we will charge for FY 2012. This
may seem like an odd thing – a federal agency collecting fees for its
services. But the NRC is required, by law, to recover about 90 percent
of our budget authority directly from the industry that we regulate.
This means the American taxpayer only foots the bill for 10 percent of
the agency’s budget.
The
NRC received a bit more than $1 billion for FY 2012, so the amount we
will recover in fees by Sept. 30 is approximately $909.5 million. We
collect those fees and send the money back to the U.S. Treasury.
We
have two types of fees. One is for specific NRC services, such as
licensing and inspection, which apply to a specific license; these make
up about 40 percent of the total fees we recover. The other 60 percent
comes from an annual fee for generic regulatory expenses and other costs
not recovered through fees for specific services.
The
recently published final fee rule has a few changes over the FY2011 fee
rule. We increased our hourly rate very slightly from $273 to $274, and
revised the flat license application fees to reflect the new hourly
rate. Also, the FY 2012 annual fees increased for some licenses due to
the increased direct budgeted resources for operating reactors, most
material users, fuel facilities and transportation. However, the annual
fees decreased for research and test reactors, spent fuel storage
facilities and most uranium recovery licenses.
The
NRC works hard to be efficient and effective and to keep the fees to
the industry as low as possible so that we are only requesting from
Congress the funding necessary to perform our vital mission.
Arlette Howard
Fee Policy Analyst
No comments:
Post a Comment