WASHINGTON, DC — In a Memorandum and order from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) and Oyster Creek Nuclear Watch (OCNW) were granted legal intervention status in their challenge to General Public Utility Nuclear’s (GPUN) plan to move highly-radioactive fuel. The fuel would be moved in heavy transfer casks from an elevated water-filled storage pond several stories up in the Oyster Creek nuclear reactor building to a interim nuclear waste dry storage facility located on the electric utility’s property in Forked River, New Jersey. The NRC’s three judge panel also accepted that the nuclear watchdog groups “have submitted a litigable contention” involving a legal question in the utility plan.
In April, 1996, GPUN filed a license amendment application with the NRC to modify its safety specifications which currently restrict the movement of heavy loads over stored irradiated fuel in the reactor to an 800 lbs. limit. In order to proceed with the plan to move a series of 100-ton casks containing the reactor’s burned atomic fuel, GPUN must first modify its technical specifications to permit the movement of a four-ton shielded lid over scores of hot radioactive fuel assemblies loaded into a NUHOMS dry storage cask set in the irradiated fuel pool. NIRS, OCNW, and a third citizen group in western Massachusetts, the Citizens Awareness Network (CAN), filed a petition to intervene and argued before the NRC judges in an August prehearing conference that the license amendment, by waiving weight restrictions on moving loads over irradiated fuel, would irresponsibly erode “defense-in-depth” procedures designed to prevent an accident involving human error, mechanical or electrical failure from damaging the highly radioactive fuel and causing radiation contamination to communities near the reactor.
The ASLB order, dated October 25, 1996 states “there is sufficient information on the record before us to establish a reasonable basis for the assertion of petitioners NIRS and OCNW that a shield plug !QD! accident can occur and that such an accident can have off-site radiological consequences that may impact the Atomic Energy Act-protected health and safety interests of their members.”
The NRC order requires GPUN to respond by November 15 to a “legitimate question” raised by the watchdog groups about the utility’s effort to change its current technical specification and its relation to a “legal interpretation” of NRC requirements governing the movement of heavy loads over stored irradiated fuel.
“The weight restriction was not written into Oyster Creek’s safety analysis by an oversight, its there to prevent a nuclear accident,” said Paul Gunter, Director of the Reactor Watchdog Project at NIRS. “GPUN’s proposed change to its safety procedures is only the first sign of a steady erosion that would need to take place for this precarious shuffling of nuclear waste at the reactor,” continued Gunter. “The obvious first step in responsibly managing this problem is to stop generating this dangerous garbage,” Gunter concluded.
“We are looking for a greater level of scrutiny in the movement of high-level radioactive waste at the reactor,” said William deCamp, Jr. of Oyster Creek Nuclear Watch. “The board’s decision confirms that our concerns are far from frivolous,” deCamp said.
The CAN group in Massachusetts is permitted to participate through submissions by amicus curiae or as a “friend of the court” but has been denied intervenor status in the Oyster Creek proceeding when the ASLB did not accept the group’s argument that a decision might establish a “bad precedent” affecting future activities at their nearby Vermont Yankee atomic power plant.