What if the abuses now surfacing from the ruins of the suspicous building collapse and tragic loss of life at the Surfside, Florida condominium were to occur at an operating nuclear power station? Too far fetched, you say?
On June 22, 2021, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) abandoned its review of an absurd industry suggestion to increase the operating license renewal period for nuclear power stations from 20 to 40-year extensions. "License renewal" has become the nuclear industry’s most viable “bridge to the future” by extending operating licenses to more extremes. We note that 90% of the NRC budget as appropriated by Congress is collected from the industry through annual reactor licensing fees.
Interestingly, the NRC staff decision to halt their review of the 40-year interval basically admits that the agency could not "reasonably assure" that safety margins projected into the extreme future can be met as aging reactors deteriorate and materially break down. With 90% of the nation’s fleet approved for 20-year extensions out to 60 years and units now being approved out to 80 years, Beyond Nuclear is documenting that NRC and the industry are already dangerously abusing the “reasonable assurance” standard in their license renewal review process for recurring extensions even using the 20-year interval.
Originally licensed to operate for 40 years, the NRC and an aging industry have been incrementally extending unit operations by 20-year intervals. Of the nation’s fleet of the remaining 93 units, 90% thus far have been approved to operate out to 60 years. The NRC is presently reviewing and approving industry applications for an additional “subsequent” extension of another 20 years out to 80-years. To the still further extreme, the NRC and industry are collaborating to see how they can extend reactor operations out to 100 years.
At a meeting with the Ohio-based Energy Harbor, aka FirstEnergy Nuclear Corporation (FENOC), on May 21, 2020, the nuclear utility wondered outloud what NRC staff thought of approving a license extension for the Perry nuclear power station on Lake Erie by combining the “initial” 20-year license renewal period (40- to 60-years) and the “subsequent” 20-year renewal license renewal (60- to 80-years) into one application for a 40-year extension. The NRC picked up on FENOC's suggestion and expanded on the idea to increase the relicensing interval to give its licensees already approved for the “initial” 40- to 60-year renewal a shot at renewing out to 100 years.
NRC convened two NRC public meetings with presentations in January and February 2021 involving the regulator, industry and the public that are summarized in a June 22, 2021 memorandum. Beyond Nuclear, an invited presenter and public interest panelist, spoke out against both the 40-year extension and the 100-year license. As the NRC summed up, we were supported by the strong voice of public opposition that called in. Beyond Nuclear presentations document that the industry age management programs as required by NRC for safety-related systems, structures and components have signficant "knowledge gaps" that magnify risk and uncertainty with each recurring 20-year “initial” and “subsequent” license renew period. As such, the review process and the utility environmental impact statements do not provide the necessary “reasonable assurance” as extensions become more extreme. Given that current safety oversight for 20-year intervals is dangerously inadequate, it makes no sense to take that to yet farther extreme, other than a blatant promotion of the nuclear industry production agenda over the public safety and environmental protection.
Beyond Nuclear argued that the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) publicly released a technical letter report on contract with NRC in December 2017 recommending that in order for NRC to approve the “subsequent” operating license extension, the federal agency needed to “require” industry to conduct autopsies at decommissioning reactors to gather and analyze the material state of “real world” aged samples strategically harvested from radiation-embrittled reactor vessels, crumbling concrete containments and the hundreds of miles of degraded electrical cable otherwise inaccessible to inspection, maintenance and surveillance in those operating reactors now seeking extensions. Subsequent to the December 2017 release of the PNNL technical report, publicly available for nine months, the NRC describes it as a "draft report" and late September 2019 pulled it from the PNNL government website as well as the Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) and the International Atomic Energy Agency's International Nuclear Information System (INIS). NRC staff then scrubbed the technical report of the laboratory recommendation to “require” autopsies and deleted scores of references to “knowledge gaps” in industry age management programs. These programs are necessary to "reasonably assure" operational reliability and public safety during the license extension. The sanitized version of the DOE technical report was republished, only on the NRC’s website, in March 2019 without comment on whether or how the agency justified deleting the recommendations and some 60 references to critical technical "knowledge gaps" in protecting public safety and assuring reliable operations for the renewal period.