Call for IP Relicensing Proceedings to Consider Environmental and Safety Concerns 

HUDSON VALLEY, NY – Hudson River Sloop Clearwater and Riverkeeper jointly filed a new legal challenge yesterday with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (“Board”) seeking to compel the NRC to assess the environmental impacts and safety concerns of indefinitely storing toxic nuclear waste on the banks of the Hudson River at the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Buchanan, NY.  The new filing responds to the NRC’s December 2010 decision upholding the so-called “Waste Confidence Rule.” In the Rule, the NRC continues to exempt nuclear waste storage from site-specific environmental or safety reviews that would otherwise be required when a nuclear plant applies for a license renewal, asserting that waste storage is safe for 60-years after a plant permanently stops operating.  The Rule fails to assess the impacts of storing the waste onsite after the 60-year period ends. 

This exemption comes despite the fact that the Commission acknowledges it cannot predict when the spent-fuel will leave the Indian Point site, if ever, because of the lack of a permanent waste disposal site. Clearwater and Riverkeeper are requesting that the Board order the NRC staff to fully assess the environmental impacts of nuclear waste storage at Indian Point prior to the relicensing of Indian Point Units 2 and 3.  By relying on the Waste Confidence Rule, the NRC is clearly ignoring the plume of radioactively contaminated groundwater that continues to leach into the Hudson River from Indian Point’s spent fuel pools, the vulnerability of the pools to terrorism and accidents, and problems with physical degradation of the racks used to hold the fuel in the pools.

“Without a national disposal site on the horizon, high-level nuclear waste produced by Indian Point has nowhere to go,” said Richard Webster of Public Justice, a Washington DC-based public interest law firm, who is serving as a consultant to Clearwater. “The NRC must either address the need for safe storage beyond the 60-year limitation that the present Waste Confidence Rule allows or not allow spent-fuel to be created.”

“Indian Point’s 1500 tons of nuclear waste are already wreaking havoc on the environment,” said Deborah Brancato, Riverkeeper Staff Attorney.  “Now NRC has ruled to let this hazardous waste sit on the banks of the Hudson River for decades and decades to come without properly assessing what the long-term impacts will be.   This decision defies science, logic, and simple common sense.”

 Background
Clearwater filed a similar set of contentions in November 2009, questioning the viability of an earlier version of the Waste Confidence Rule and calling for an assessment of the environmental and safety impacts of the long-term storage of spent radioactive fuel on site at the Indian Point.  The earlier version of the Rule concluded that nuclear waste could be stored safely for at least 30 years beyond the end of a plant’s license, and that a permanent repository would be available after that.  The NRC rejected the 2009 contention as premature, but recognized that the new rule needed to be completed prior to any relicensing of Indian Point.

Since 1983, the Department of Energy (DOE), which was legally required to begin accepting waste from Indian Point in 1998, has tried unsuccessfully to site a permanent geological repository. In 1987, Congress selected Yucca Mountain in Nevada for this site, but decades of resistance by the State of Nevada and environmental groups led to the decision by the Obama Administration to cut off all funding for the project and order the DOE to withdraw its application, essentially killing the Yucca Mountain proposal for good.  To date, virtually all the nuclear waste produced by nuclear power plants has remained onsite at each plant. In the case of Indian Point, the plant has become a de-facto toxic waste dump; there are presently 1,500 tons of nuclear waste at Indian Point.  If the plant is relicensed for another twenty years, an additional 1,000 tons of waste will be produced with no solution for its disposal. Following the Department of Energy decision to cease attempting to create a mined geological repository for commercial high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel at Yucca Mountain, Clearwater asked the licensing board to evaluate the long-term safety and environmental effects of radioactive waste storage at Indian Point. 

As it presently stands, if Indian Point is granted the relicensing an extended operating license, spent nuclear waste will continue accumulating at Indian Point and neither Entergy nor the NRC has assessed the safety or environmental impacts of the long-term storage of spent fuel.  Currently, the waste is stored in overcrowded spent fuel pools and in above ground dry cask storage.  The spent fuel pools have been holding waste for longer than anticipated and the pools are packed more densely than originally intended. 

 About the Waste Confidence Rule: In October 1979, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission initiated a rulemaking process known as the Waste Confidence proceeding, to assess: 1) its degree of assurance that radioactive wastes produced by nuclear power plants can be safely disposed of; 2) to determine when such disposal or offsite storage will be available, and 3) to determine whether radioactive wastes can be safely stored onsite past the expiration of existing facility licenses until offsite disposal or storage is available. This became known as the Waste Confidence Rule, and it provides generic findings relevant to environmental analyses related to power reactor licensing.

Click here to view the  Clearwater and Riverkeeper’s joint motion to add new contentions to Indian Point relicensing proceedings
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