Groups petition US NRC to suspend nuclear power license reviews

Washington (Platts)--14Apr2011/432 pm EDT/2032 GMT

A coalition of 45 groups and individuals has asked the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to "immediately suspend" all licensing of new nuclear power reactors and license renewals for operating reactors "until the the agency completes a thorough post-Fukushima reactor crisis examination," the coalition said Thursday.

The groups said "the commission should suspend all decisions regarding the issuance of construction permits, new reactor licenses, combined construction permit and operating licenses, early site permits, license renewals, or standardized design certification" pending completion of reviews now being conducted by the NRC staff of lessons learned from the ongoing accident at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima 1 plant.

In a news conference, the petitioners said the agency's reviews should be supplemented by an investigation by a presidential commission, similar to the Kemeny Commission, which was created by President Jimmy Carter to investigate the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island-2.

Diane Curran, an attorney representing the petitioners, said the NRC is legally obligated under the National Environmental Policy Act to complete its review of the Fukushima accident "before it allows another reactor to operate."

The petition said that NEPA and the Atomic Energy Act "forbid the NRC from issuing licenses for which it lacks reasonable assurance or safe operation or for which it failed to consider all information significantly bearing on the environmental impacts of reactor operation."

Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, said the events at Fukushima are "rewriting the book on nuclear reactor accidents," and "continuing business as usual in licensing and reactor certification in the face of the unprecedented, hugely complicated, and ongoing Fukushima accident would be rash."

The NRC is actively reviewing 13 applications to build 22 new nuclear units and considering some new designs for certification. The agency announced March 21 that it would conduct a 90-day review of lessons learned from the Fukushima accident, followed by a six-month review that would begin when more solid information becomes available.

NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko said last month that some of these applications are "in the last phase" of their reviews and the NRC could be ready to decide on them by "later this summer or early fall." Jaczko said he would like to see NRC's Fukushima reviews "very far along if not resolved" by that time.

"If information tells us we need to make changes to our licensing process, we will do that," Jaczko said.

--Steven Dolley, steven_dolley@platts.com

To subscribe or visit go to:  http://www.platts.com