I'm not much of a writer, but wanted to put out what appears to be important news concerning the future of nuclear power in the US.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has been told to halt all re-permitting of older plants, and permitting of new nuclear power plants, until appropriate environmental impact studies have been made concerning storage of nuclear waste.
Fierce Energy has a succinct summation:
The Federal Appeals Court has ordered the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to consider and analyze the environmental impacts of generating spent nuclear fuel. In response to the landmark Waste Confidence Rule decision, NRC must act to put a hold on at least 19 final reactor licensing decisions, including nine construction and operating licenses (COLS), eight license renewals, one operating license and one early site permit.
The action is the result of a petition filed by 24 groups urging the NRC to freeze final licensing decisions until it has completed a rulemaking action on the environmental impacts of highly radioactive nuclear waste in the form of spent, or 'used', reactor fuel storage and disposal.
"It is important to recognize that the reactors awaiting construction licenses weren't going to be built anytime soon even without the Court decision or NRC action," Former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford said. "Falling demand, cheaper alternatives and runaway nuclear costs had doomed their near-term prospects well before the recent Court decision. Important though the Court decision is in modifying the NRC's historic push-the-power-plants-but-postpone-the-problems approach to generic safety and environmental issues, it cannot be blamed for ongoing descent into fiasco of the bubble once known as 'the nuclear renaissance'."
They also point to a link to a longer article,
US NRC freezes decisions on new reactor, license renewal applications.
This seems like a very, very big deal, and I'm interested in the DKOS community response. The NRC apparently has until August 22 to respond, but it is not known if they will. One source says that it is 'unlikely', but I have no basis to evaluate that statement.
Knowing the history of the decades-long, billions-wasting search for an appropriate storage sitefor nuclear waste in the US, it would seem impossible for the NRC to come up with any credible plan in the near term. They seem effectively blocked from making their usual vague boilerplate 'we'll come up with something within 60 years' assertion.
My first reaction: Fukushima hangs over us all.....