U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION EXPERIENCE IMPLEMENTING A RISK-INFORMED GRADED APPROACH FOR INSTITUTIONAL CONTROLS TO RESTRICT SITE USE

摘要

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulates the decommissioning and license termination of approximately 60 complex, commercial nuclear facilities, including power reactors, research and test reactors, material sites, and fuel cycle facilities. Its primary decommissioning regulation, License Termination Rule (LTR) in 10 CFR 20, Subpart E, provides requirements for decommissioning and license termination with either no restrictions on future land use (I.e., unrestricted use) or restrictions (I.e., restricted use). Although NRC prefers license termination with unrestricted use, it recognizes that a few licensees may not be able to meet the requirements for unrestricted release; thus, institutional controls to restrict the future use of the site could be approved. NRC and licensee experience during the past few years has shown that arranging the required legally enforceable institutional controls and independent third party agreements has not been successful. As a result, this issue has complicated developing plans for decommissioning and delayed progress at a few sites. To resolve this issue, NRC developed: 1) a risk-informed, graded approach for selecting institutional controls; 2) NRC possession-only license for long-term control; and 3) NRC monitoring institutional controls after license termination using a legal agreement and deed restriction. Since these options were approved by the Commission, the NRC staff has been working to implement the first two options at the Shieldalloy Metallurgical Corp (SMC) site in New Jersey and the West Valley Demonstration Project site in New York. The purpose of this paper is to provide general background about NRC's restricted use requirements, discuss its new policy options, summarize the progress implementing these options at the two sites, and identify plans for future work.