NRC Moves to Adopt EPA Radiation Standard for Yucca Mountain

From the NRC:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is proposing to amend its regulations to govern the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) proposed high-level radioactive waste disposal facility at Yucca Mountain, Nev. The amendments would adopt the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) recently proposed revisions to its standards for radiation doses that could occur more than 10,000 years after waste disposal.

The Energy Policy Act requires the NRC to make its regulations consistent with EPA’s standards for Yucca Mountain.

The new EPA standards, published Aug. 22, would leave in place the current standard of a peak dose of 15 millirems for the first 10,000 years following disposal. After 10,000 years, the standard would be 350 millirems. These same EPA values would be contained in the revised NRC regulations.

The proposed NRC regulations also indicate that, in demonstrating compliance with the radiation dose standards, DOE must assess the effects of climate changes more than 10,000 years after disposal. The proposal specifies a range of values that DOE should draw from when representing these changes. The climate change analysis would be limited to the effects of increased water flow to the repository as a result of the change (up to approximately 6 times greater than would be expected today), and any resulting release of radioactive materials to the environment.

In addition, the proposed NRC changes specify that DOE should calculate radiation doses to workers at the Yucca Mountain facility using current scientific methods, in the same way that EPA is proposing for calculating doses for members of the public.

Comments

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...

NEI Nuclear Notes

Search This Blog