Nuclear power plants are subjected to unnecessarily long wait periods before being approved to improve their facilities due to vague guidelines.
In order to make improvements, a plant must submit a request containing a safety analysis to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, according to an inspector general report. However, applicants and review staff alike are uncertain as to what needs to be contained in the request.
“NRC should … regulate in a manner that clearly communicates requirements,” the inspector general said. “Effective guidance for submitting and reviewing … analyses will help enhance program efficiency and effectiveness.”
One applicant told investigators a request’s success is a “crapshoot,” depending on which reviewer was assigned to it. After the submission, the commission embarks on what another applicant called a “fishing expedition” to find additional information, the inspector general said.
Consequently, once an application is submitted to the NRC, a nuclear plant may wait up to a year for a response. Afterwards, each request the commission makes for additional information takes an applicant about a month to reply, which will result in another waiting period.
The entire process can take up to three years.
Both speed and safety are essential facets of the review process. The specific applications in question contain analyses of 40-foot deep pools that cool and shield used, radioactive fuel.
Given the growing amount of spent fuel, the pools need to be quickly altered to allow a larger capacity for the plant to continue to operate efficiently. However, the danger that the fuel could inadvertently continue its nuclear reaction within the pool makes safety, and therefore, thorough analyses also imperative.
Regardless, nearly three-fifths of completed requests took between one and two years since 2010. The remainder was split evenly between taking under a year and between two and three years.
The NRC is supposed to have 95 percent of reviews completed within a year. However, only about one of every 10 submitted are processed that quickly.
Aside from guidelines that are unclear to both applicants and NRC staff, the limited number of reviewers, the increasing complexity of the analyses, and limited resources caused delays.
The group that reviews the applications “has often been understaffed over the years due to reassignments, staff departures and extended absences,” which is especially damaging since the analyses “are very specialized and highly technical,” which requires significant training and highly specific qualifications, the inspector general said.
