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NRC Issues License to Holtec International for Consolidated Spent Nuclear Fuel Interim Storage Facility in New Mexico
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a license to Holtec International to construct and operate a consolidated interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in Lea County, New Mexico.
The license, issued May 9, authorizes the company to receive, possess, transfer and store 500 canisters holding approximately 8,680 metric tons of commercial spent nuclear fuel for 40 years. The company said it plans to eventually store up to 10,000 canisters in an additional
19 phases. Each expansion phase would require a license amendment with additional NRC safety and environmental reviews.
The spent fuel must be stored in canisters and cask systems certified by the NRC as meeting standards for protection against leakage, radiation dose rates, and criticality under normal and accident conditions. The canisters are required to be sealed prior to arrival at the facility. They will be inspected upon arrival and will remain sealed during onsite handling and storage activities.
The NRC’s review of the license application included a technical safety and security review, an environmental impact review and adjudication before an Atomic Safety and Licensing Board. A safety evaluation report, documenting the technical review, is being issued along with the license. A final environmental impact statement was published last July and supplemented in October. The environmental study included extensive public input during its development and during the comment phase. The adjudication resolved contentions filed by several local and national petitioners.
Information about the Holtec application and the NRC’s review is available on the NRC website. Licensing documents will also be posted on this site.
The NRC has previously issued similar licenses for away-from-reactor storage installations. Private Fuel Storage received a license in 2006, but was never constructed. The NRC issued a license in September 2021 to Interim Storage Partners LLC for a proposed storage site in Andrews, Texas. ISP has not yet initiated construction.
Constellation says the IRA's tax credits for nuclear could boost its profits by $100 million per year and help extend the life of its reactors to 80 years.
NRC Begins Special Inspection at Urenco USA Facility
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has launched a special inspection at the Urenco USA uranium enrichment facility in Eunice, New Mexico. The inspection follows an April 21 incident involving the operation of a crane near a building that handles uranium hexafluoride without the required safety controls present.
The facility is safe, but the event raises concerns about safety protocols at the site and warrants additional NRC inspection as it involves a breakdown of controls designed to prevent chemical, radiological, and criticality hazards – the primary concern at U.S. fuel cycle facilities. Two similar events occurred in 2022, prompting the NRC to propose Urenco USA receive a $70,000 civil penalty earlier this month.
The inspection began today and inspectors from the NRC’s Region II office in Atlanta are at the Urenco USA plant. Over several days, the inspectors will assess the effectiveness of previous corrective actions taken by the facility to implement safety controls during construction activities and evaluate the appropriateness of the company's overall response.
“The recurrence of safety incidents at the Urenco USA fuel fabrication facility is concerning, and we expect all our license holders to prioritize safety, strictly adhere to the highest standards, and take prompt action to correct deficiencies,” said NRC Region II Administrator Laura Dudes. “We're committed to holding all NRC license holders accountable and taking appropriate action to protect public health and safety.”
The inspection team will document their findings and conclusions in a public report typically issued within 45 days of the completion of the inspection.
Former Nuclear Leaders: Say ‘No’ to New Reactors The former heads of nuclear power regulation in the U.S., Germany, and France, along with the former secretary to the UK’s government radiation protection committee, have issued a joint statement that in part says, “Nuclear is just not part of any feasible strategy that could counter climate change.”
The statement issued Jan. 25 notes the importance of global action to combat climate issues, but the four leaders say nuclear power is too costly, and too risky an investment, to be a viable strategy against climate change.
The four leaders issuing the joint statement include:
Dr. Greg Jaczko, former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and founder of Maxean, an energy company.
Prof. Wolfgang Renneberg, a university professor and former Head of the Reactor Safety, Radiation Protection and Nuclear Waste, Federal Environment Ministry, Germany.
Dr. Bernard Laponche, a French engineer and author, and former Director General, French Agency for Energy Management, former Advisor to French Minister of Environment, Energy and Nuclear Safety.
Dr. Paul Dorfman, an associate fellow and researcher at the University of Sussex, and former Secretary UK Govt. Committee Examining Radiation Risk from Internal Emitters.
Here’s the text of the statement:
“The climate is running hot. Evolving knowledge of climate sensitivity and polar ice melt-rate makes clear that sea-level rise is ramping, along with destructive storm, storm surge, severe precipitation and flooding, not forgetting wildfire. With mounting concern and recognition over the speed and pace of the low carbon energy transition that’s needed, nuclear has been reframed as a partial response to the threat of global heating. But at the heart of this are questions about whether nuclear could help with the climate crisis, whether nuclear is economically viable, what are the consequences of nuclear accidents, what to do with the waste, and whether there’s a place for nuclear within the swiftly expanding renewable energy evolution.
“As key experts who have worked on the front-line of the nuclear issue, we’ve all involved at the highest governmental nuclear regulatory and radiation protection levels in the US, Germany, France and UK. In this context, we consider it our collective responsibility to comment on the main issue: Whether nuclear could play a significant role as a strategy against climate change.
“The central message, repeated again and again, that a new generation of nuclear will be clean, safe, smart and cheap, is fiction. The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm. Nuclear isn’t cheap, but extremely costly. Perhaps most importantly nuclear is just not part of any feasible strategy that could counter climate change. To make a relevant contribution to global power generation, up to more than ten thousand new reactors would be required, depending on reactor design.”
The statement includes a list of items (below) the leaders see as making an argument against nuclear power.
In short, nuclear as strategy against climate change is:
Too costly in absolute terms to make a relevant contribution to global power production
More expensive than renewable energy in terms of energy production and CO2 mitigation, even taking into account costs of grid management tools like energy storage associated with renewables rollout.
Too costly and risky for financial market investment, and therefore dependent on very large public subsidies and loan guarantees.
Unsustainable due to the unresolved problem of very long-lived radioactive waste.
Financially unsustainable as no economic institution is prepared to insure against the full potential cost, environmental and human impacts of accidental radiation release – with the majority of those very significant costs being borne by the public.
Militarily hazardous since newly promoted reactor designs increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.
Inherently risky due to unavoidable cascading accidents from human error, internal faults, and external impacts; vulnerability to climate-driven sea-level rise, storm, storm surge, inundation and flooding hazard, resulting in international economic impacts.
Subject to too many unresolved technical and safety problems associated with newer unproven concepts, including ‘Advanced’ and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).
Too unwieldy and complex to create an efficient industrial regime for reactor construction and operation processes within the intended build-time and scope needed for climate change mitigation.
Unlikely to make a relevant contribution to necessary climate change mitigation needed by the 2030’s due to nuclear’s impracticably lengthy development and construction time-lines, and the overwhelming construction costs of the very great volume of reactors that would be needed to make a difference.
—This commentary solely represents the views of those releasing the statement and is published as a courtesy by POWER.
Tom Smith, William Walker and Neil Smith respond to Samanth Subramanian’s long read on the enormous task of dismantling Sellafield Thu 22 Dec 2022 12.15 EST
The industry’s solution to this is a network of deep disposal facilities. But none have yet been created, their cost is enormous and there is no certainty that they will perform the long-term task required of them. These are considerations that sadly receive little attention in current debates about the need for new nuclear-generation capacity.
Coincidentally, you published a letter (14 December) suggesting that nuclear radiation is less dangerous than emissions from a wood-burning stove, a curious comparison to make. Wood-burning stoves are pollutants, no question, but they could never lead to a Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chornobyl or Fukushima. Nor will decommissioning them cost billions and take decades.
Tom Smith Chair, Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, 2017-20
► In 1993, a government official told me that “it was sometimes right to do the wrong thing”. For reasons of political expediency, it was right to give political consent for the operation of the thermal oxide reprocessing plant (Thorp) at Sellafield. This huge facility, not mentioned in Samanth Subramanian’s fine long read, had been built over the previous decade to reprocess British and foreign, especially Japanese, spent nuclear fuels. Abandoning it would be too embarrassing for the many politicians and their parties that had backed it, expensive in terms of compensation for broken contracts, and damaging to Britain’s and the nuclear industry’s international reputation.
It was wrong to proceed, as the government well knew, because the primary justification for its construction – supply of plutonium for fast breeder reactors (FBRs) – had been swept away by the abandonment of FBRs in the 1980s (none were built anywhere). Because returning Thorp’s separated plutonium and radwaste to Japan would be difficult and risky. Because decommissioning Thorp would become much more costly after its radioactive contamination. Because there was a known win-win solution, favoured by most utilities – store the spent fuel safely at Sellafield prior to its return to senders, avoiding the many troubles that lay ahead.
Thorp operated fitfully until its closure in 2018. The 30 tonnes of plutonium that it separated remains at Sellafield – another waste to trouble generations to come. William Walker Edinburgh
► Anton van der Merwe makes the compelling point that lack of investment in nuclear power over the last 40 years has had a disastrous impact on carbon emissions and therefore has exacerbated the climate emergency (Letters, 14 December). However, in the same issue, the long read discusses plans for new nuclear without mentioning the huge beneficial impact that low-carbon nuclear will need to have if we are to avoid climate catastrophe. The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on 1.5C temperature rises published in 2018 presented mitigation scenarios in which nuclear generation would grow on average 2.5 times from today’s level by 2050. Without this, the chances of meeting climate targets are much reduced. Neil Smith Solihull, West Midlands
The bill would require the Florida Department of Transportation to complete a study on the feasibility of using phosphogypsum as a material for road construction, with a short timeline and completion date of April 1, 2024.
“The only way Gov. DeSantis can assure Floridians he’s serious about protecting them from this radioactive waste is to veto this reckless bill,” said Ragan Whitlock, a Florida-based attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “This dangerous plan to pave Florida’s roads with toxic phosphate mining waste is an egregious handout to an industry that has a lengthy history of damaging the environment and putting public health at risk.”
The EPA currently requires that phosphogypsum be stored in piles called “gypstacks” that are hundreds of acres wide and hundreds of feet tall.
More than 1 billion tons of radioactive waste are already stored in 25 stacks in Florida.
According to a news release from the organizations opposing this bill, “The industry has a demonstrated history of inadequate management when it comes to phosphogypsum waste. The stacks are prone to spills and sinkholes - like the breach at Piney Point and sinkholes at New Wales - that threaten Tampa Bay and the Floridan Aquifer.”
“No environmentally conscious or ‘green’ governor worth his salt would ever sign a bill into law approving roadbuilding with radioactive materials,” said Rachael Curran, an attorney with People for Protecting Peace River. “Even the fast-tracked ‘study’ contemplated by this industry-sponsored bill would create harm because that study involves a full-scale road project that would have very real, very detrimental impacts to the environment and health of Floridians, especially road-construction crews.”
In 2020 the Trump-era EPA approved the use of phosphogypsum in roads. Following a lawsuit and petition by the Center and other conservation, public health and union groups, in 2021 the agency withdrew that approval.
Putting radioactive phosphogypsum in roads would let the fertilizer industry off the hook for safely disposing of the millions of tons of dangerous waste it creates each year while generating another cash stream for industry giants, the release stated.
Notice of Public Meeting on June 7, 2023 - Annual Assessment Meeting (Webinar) for PA/MD/NY/NJ Nuclear Power Plants (Beaver Valley, Calvert Cliffs, Hope Creek, Fitzpatrick, Limerick, Nine Mile Point, Peach Bottom, R.E. Ginna, Salem, and Susquehanna)
Join us Tuesday, May 16, 10am-11:30am ET for Beyond Nuclear's first online teach-in on continuing threats to dump huge amounts of tritium (pictured) into our environment. Tritium in the US Nuclear Power Sector features: Dr. Ian Fairlie providing an overview of tritium and the harm it causes; Mary Lampert of Pilgrim Watch describing opposition to tritium dumping by Holtec into Cape Cod Bay from the closed Pilgrim, MA nuclear power plant; and lawyer, Michel Lee of the Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy, who will discuss the threat of tritium dumping from the Indian Point nuclear power plant in NY into the Hudson River. A future tritium teach-in will focus on environmental justice issues around a nuclear weapons lab and Japan's threat to dump wastewater from the Fukushima meltdown.
Civil society organizations from the US and Russia are co-hosting an online conference to explore the environmental hazards of decommissioning nuclear power plants and ways to ensure the transfer of these facilities to a state that will be environmentally safe for present and future generations. The U.S.-Russia people-to-people online mini-conference takes place on Friday, May 19, 10am-12:30pm ET. Register here. Simultaneous translation will be provided. US and Russian speakers will explore ways to democratize the process and improve safety during decommissioning through greater transparency and effective interaction of stakeholders. They will also evaluate the opportunity for “autopsy” of decommissioned reactors to inform the condition of plants seeking license extensions.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission revealed that six months ago, ground settling at the Davis-Besse reactor on Lake Erie in Ohio (photo) damaged fire-fighting water pipes. Additional settling across the site was discovered two months ago. The Toledo Blade reports: Toledo-based activist Terry Lodge said he hopes the NRC “will note the history of cracking of the shield building at Davis-Besse, which contains the nuclear reactor.” That cracking was attributed to the Blizzard of 1978 several years ago. But Mr. Lodge said effects of settling “might directly affect its remaining, and suspect, stability.” Lodge served as legal counsel from 2011-2016, as we challenged the dangerous cracking, and sought to block Davis-Besse's 2017-2037 license extension.
Nuclear reactors in war torn Ukraine remain in peril. Japan is threatening to start dumping 1.3 million tons of radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear site into the ocean any day. The IPCC has released its most dire climate warnings ever and yet propaganda in favor of small modular reactors continues unabated. In the US, reactor owners are pursuing license renewals to extend reactor operations as long as 80 years. With no solution for the radioactive waste, minority communities are targeted with waste dumps. That’s why we need your support now more than ever to block these dangerous proposals and redirect policy to the fastest and most effective choices — renewable energy and energy efficiency. Please donate to Beyond Nuclear today.
Tritium and the U.S. Nuclear Power Sector is the first in our two-part webinar series on the threats to dump huge amounts of tritium (radioactive hydrogen) from the nuclear power and nuclear weapons sectors into our environment.
What is tritium? Why is it harmful? What damage can it do in our environment and how does it get into the food chain and into our bodies? And are there alternatives to releasing it?
Speakers (pictured above, left to right)
Dr. Ian Fairlie, an independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment and a tritium expert who will provide an overview of tritium and its pathways.
Mary Lampert of Pilgrim Watch, who will address Holtec’s plan to dump 1 million gallons of tritiated water from Pilgrim into Cape Cod Bay.
Michel Lee, a New York attorney with Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy, who will discuss the similar threat of tritium dumping by Holtec from New York’s Indian Point nuclear power plant into the Hudson River.
A question and answer period will follow the presentations.
Outrage has been voiced from around the world at Japan’s plan to dump more than one million tonnes of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean, contaminated mainly with tritium. But here in the US, water contaminated with tritium could soon be dumped into Cape Cod Bay in Massachusetts from the closed Pilgrim nuclear power plant, and into New York’s Hudson River from the decommissioning Indian Point nuclear power plant.
Although Holtec has “paused” its plans to dump tritium for now from Indian Point and agreed to further study at Pilgrim, the company has few constraints from proceeding and could ignore public and state opposition.
Our second webinar, to be announced soon, will focus on environmental justice issues around the proposed tritium vapor release from Los Alamos National Laboratory as well as Japan's threat to dump tritiated water from Fukushima into the ocean.
Please accept the comments attached in response to the above referenced proceeding, published in the Federal Register on March 3, 2023 (Renewing Nuclear Power Plant Operating Licenses-Environmental Review), submitted on behalf of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Alliance for a Green Economy, Citizens Resistance at Fermi Two, Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone, EFMR Monitoring Group at Three Mile Island, Physicians for Social Responsibility Wisconsin, and Seacoast Anti-Pollution League.
