NRC to prepare EIS on Columbia fuel facility license renewal

摘要

NRC said June 5 it will prepare an environmental impact statement on Westinghouse’s 2014 application to renew for 40 years the operating license for its Columbia, South Carolina fuel fabrication facility, after receiving new site groundwater data. “Based on the NRC’s independent evaluation of the new data as part of the EA [environmental assessment] process, the NRC decided it could no longer conclude that renewal of the license would result in a finding of no significant impact,” the agency said. “As a result, the NRC will proceed with an EIS,” it said, despite having issued a draft environmental assessment for the facility in October (Nuclear Fuel, 18 Nov ‘19, 5). NRC spokesman David McIntyre said June 5 that the agency had received in March groundwater data from more than 40 new wells Westinghouse installed at the facility site in the summer of 2019. Such data “does not present any operational or immediate safety concerns, but it raises uncertainty about the source and extent of contamination on the site,” McIntyre said. The new data was provided in a Westinghouse report which identified among other concerns new contamination from uranium and volatile organic compounds, NRC said in a June 5 letter to Westinghouse. “This is the first time we’ll do [an EIS] for a fuel facility license renewal,” McIntyre noted.