ML11307A456
| ML11307A456 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Site: | Limerick  |
| Issue date: | 10/28/2011 |
| From: | Fettus G, Paine C, Weaver C National Resources Defense Counsil (NRDC) |
| To: | Cindy Bladey Rulemaking, Directives, and Editing Branch |
| References | |
| 76FR53498 00036, NRC-2011-0166-0003 | |
| Download: ML11307A456 (8) | |
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-ýZ 7r, Page 1 of 1 PUBLIC SUBMISSION As of: November 01, 2011 Received: October 28, 2011 Status: PendingPost Tracking No. 80f5f48c Comments Due: October 28, 2011 Submission Type: Web Docket: NRC-2011-0166 Notice of Receipt and Availability of Application for Renewal of Limerick Generating Station, Units 1 and 2 Facility Operating License Comment On: NRC-2011-0166-0003 Exelon Generation Company, LLC; Notice of Intent to Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement and Conduct the Scoping Process for Limerick Generating Station, Units 1 and 2 Document: NRC-2011-0166-DRAFT-0021 Comment on FR Doc # 2011-21921 r"-I Submitter Information Name: Jordan Weaver Address:
K 1152 15th Street NW, Suite 300 Washington, DC, 20005 Organization: Natural Resources Defense Council 0'.
General Comment See attached file(s)
Attachments NRDC Comments on Limerick EIS Scoping NRC-2011-0166 - 28 Oct 2011 OL)~rI
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"NRDC THE EARTH'S BEST DEFENSE October 28, 2011 Via Electronic Mail Ms. Cindy Bladey Chief, Rules, Announcements, and Directives Branch Office of Administration U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Washington, D.C.20555-0001 Electronic Mail: cindy.bladey@nrc.gov RE:
Natural Resources Defense Council Comments on Limerick EIS Scoping Process NRC Docket ID: NRC-2011-0166
Dear Ms. Bladey:
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) comments today on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) Notice of Intent To Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement and Conduct the Scoping Process Jbr Limerick Generating Station, Units I and 2, (hereinafter "Limerick EIS Scoping Process"). 76 Fed. Reg. 53498 (August 26, 2011).
Summary of Comments Our comments specifically address the NRC's National Environmental Policy Act ((NEPA) 42 U.S.C. § 4321, et seq,) obligations and the need for any environmental analysis the agency conducts to include an up-to-date "Severe Accident Mitigation Alternatives" (SAMA) analysis that fully incorporates current insights into severe nuclear accident causation and mitigation.
While we recognize that, as a private entity, the relicensing applicant, Exelon Generation Company, is not directly bound by NEPA, the same is not true for the NRC. Given that the applicant's ER generally serves as the basis for the Commission's eventual Draft Environmental Impact Statement (Draft EIS), and Exelon suggests it need not revise and update its SAMA analysis, we are raising this NEPA concern at this early stage in hopes that this matter may be addressed before the agency moves to relicense a facility based.on a legally insufficient NEPA review.
Specific Scoping Comments The original SAMA analysis for the Limerick Generating Station (LGS) is a 1989 report that was issued as the result of a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit,' which concluded that the NRC had failed to consider a "reasonable set" of Severe Accident Mitigation Design Alternatives ("SAMDAs"). In 1989, the NRC subsequently adopted this SAMDA analysis and agency staff concluded they had "discovered no substantial changes in the proposed action as previously evaluated in the FES [Final Environmental Statement] that are relevant to environmental concerns nor significant new circumstances or infomration relevant to environmental concerns and bearing on the licensing of [LGS]".
As the original LGS SAMDA effort in 1989 was the first mandated effort to focus on SAMAs,2 the notion that an updated SAMA analysis need not be completed at the license renewal stage (for the exact reactor site that gave birth to the regulatory requirement) we find highly objectionable, particularly in light of the catastrophic nuclear accident that befell similar Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) units in Japan in March, 2011. It has become clear in the 770 years of combined U.S. BWR operational experience since 1989 that domestic and international events provide numerous examples of "new information" and make a strong case for the need to reconsider all that has been learned about newly discovered risks and vulnerabilities of nuclear power plants.
It has been noted 3 that global core damage events happen at a rate that exceeds NRC's presumptions of what should be considered safe at plants within the U.S., which implies that either the NRC estimates for domestic plants are wrong or that international nuclear plants have a core damage frequency much higher than what the NRC deems safe. Either scenario is troubling and deserves the industry's full attention and effort. Exelon's 1989 effort in response to the Court was, respectfully, less than one would have hoped for in light of the seriousness of the issue. The LGS 1989 SAMDA can in no way claim necessary conservatism with regard to public safety over the total timeframe of a possible sixty year reactor lifetime.
In contrast to the 1989 SAMDA, relatively recent SAMA analyses conducted in other license renewal applications, such as those for sites at Nine Mile Point, Three Mile Island, and the Joseph M. Farley Nuclear Plant, to name a few, were considerably more thorough and addressed a range of detailed alternatives. Pursuant to regulatory analysis techniques supplied by NRC 4 and aided by an industry-supplied guidance documents, most modem-day SAMA analyses are designed using a fairly prescriptive set of initial assumptions, baseline calculations, and cost-benefit arithmetic recipes that employ the use of sophisticated codes in their evaluation of potential risk and the benefit of removing this risk.
1 Limerick Ecology Action v. NRC, 869 F.2d 719 (3rd Cir. 1989) 2 Or SAMDAs in this case, and we use the terms interchangeably for the purposes of these comments.
3 Global Implications of the Fukushima Disaster for Nuclear Power, T. Cochran, M. McKinzie (NRDC). World Federation of Scientists' International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies. Erice, Sicily. Aug 2011.
4 NUREG/BR-0 184 Regulatoiy Analysis Technical Evaluation Handbook, Jan 1997 5 NEI 05-01 [Rev A] Severe Accident Mitigation Alternatives (SAMAI)
Analysis - Guidance Document, Nov 2005
The most common code used is the MELCOR accident consequence code system (MACCS2)6,
which provides a modeling framework for calculating the off-site consequences of a severe accident. This code accepts an advanced set of input parameters, including population density distributions within 50 miles, detailed regional economic data obtained from multiple sources, nuclide release scenarios accounting for reactor core inventory, emergency response and exposure variables, and meteorological data for plume migration pathways. The current state of knowledge regarding the assumptions and understanding of severe accident events has expanded and improved in the intervening twenty-two years since the initial SAMDA analysis for LGS.
While we acknowledge that this analysis was limited by the knowledge available at the time, the limitations and shortcomings of a previous era in no way disqualify the claim that, in light of numerous advances in modeling capabilities, a library of discovered cost-beneficial SAMAs, and the saliency of severe accident risks following the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, not only is there new and significant information, there are significant volumes of this information acquired since 1989.
In the licensee's current environmental report, the identification and treatment of new and significant information (four items in total) were developed only in the narrow context of how they may affect the dated SAMDA analysis. It should go without saying that this approach does not comprise all of the applicable new and noteworthy severe accident mitigation strategies bearing on the site in question, or serve to remedy gaps and omissions in the original SAMDA analysis.
The entire set of first-stage envisioned alternatives in the initial SAMDA analysis was no more than fifteen options. The "analysis" in the current environmental report consists of perfunctory, "back-of-the-envelope" calculations in lieu of a proper SAMA analysis. The current operator Exelon referred to these considerations as representing an "abundance of caution." We disagree.
One of the largest problems with the calculations offered, aside from only focusing on an arbitrarily limited number of alternatives, is that licensee evaluated each item of new information in isolation of the other factors that would also change the cost-benefit conclusion for a particular alternative. The effects of each changed parameter (e.g., population, offsite economic risk, cost per person-rem averted, and seismic hazards) should be evaluated in a comprehensive model that shows the aggregate benefit, as performed in all current day SAMA analyses. Unfortunately, their analysis barely scraped the surface of how this new information should actually be considered in the context of environmental impacts.
In comparison, a "reasonable set" of alternatives for another recently relicensed plant included an initial consideration of 128 SAMA candidates developed from previous lists at other plants, NRC documents, and documents related to advanced power reactor designs.7 After screening this initial set for non-applicable or previously implemented designs as well as combining/dropping common-benefit options, the applicant was still left with a set of forty unique SAMA candidates, for which it was required to enter preliminary cost estimates in a so-called "Phase I Analysis." A 6 NUREG/CR-6613, Vol. 1, Code Manualfor M4CCS2, User's Guide, D. Chanin & M.L. Young, May 1998 7 Joseph M. Farley Nuclear Plant - Application for License Renewal, Appendix D. Environmental Report, Attachment F. Severe Accident Mitigation Alternatives, Sept 2003
total of fifteen SAMA candidates survived this screening to enter more detailed cost consideration in the Phase II analysis, of which none were deemed cost-beneficial. However, in another renewal application, 8 the SAMA analysis found eleven potentially cost-beneficial options from an initial set of thirty-three.
In an NRC report discussing insights on SAMAs in connection with plant license renewals, 9 the agency authors list numerous potentially cost-beneficial SAMAs relating to station blackouts, protection and support systems, procedures and training, and external events such as flood, fire, and seismic hazards. The authors note that "averted onsite costs (AOSC) is a critical factor in cost-benefit analyses and tends to make preventative SAMAs more attractive than mitigative SAMAs." This AOSC factor was not considered in either the original SAMDA or the recently submitted environmental report.
Finally, NRDC believes that in addition to a comprehensively updated SAMA analysis, the licensee or agency must conduct a study that, as part of the supplemental environmental impact statement, presents postulated accident scenarios showing the full range and weight of environmental, economic, and health risks posed by these accidents. This type of study should model site-specific severe accidents and illustrate the full consequences of a range of severe accident scenarios so that the public and their policy makers can make informed decisions whether to continue plant operations after the existing licenses expire, thereby continuing to run the risk of a severe nuclear accident, invest in additional accident mitigation capabilities, or alternatively, avoid these risks altogether by relying on a portfolio of low carbon electricity generation alternatives that could meet future electricity service needs over the license extension period.
The SAMA analyses are inadequate in this regard because they only address isolated issues in a cost-benefit analysis that discounts the cumulative impacts on displaced populations, regional economic losses, and environmental cleanup. These types of calculations do not present a clear picture of the potential hazards or costs experienced in the event of a severe accident. Instead they tend to mask the full range of accident consequences that policy makers may wish to avoid.
Recently, NRDC produced an analysis, of the type we believe should be included in the Limerick NEPA analysis, to inform ongoing relicensing efforts at the Indian Point nuclear plant site.1° In order to illustrate the full extent of a major accident, the NRDC study used the U.S.
Department of Defense computer model HPAC (Hazard Prediction and Assessment Capability)"1 to calculate site-specific release radiological source-terms, resulting fallout plumes, and data on the effects on nearby populations. The results were compared to similar modeling of the Fukushima disaster to provide a sense of scale, and to estimate the rough magnitude of financial 8 Three Mile Island Nuclear Station Unit 1 - License Renewal Application, Environmental Report, Appendix E.
SAMA ANALYSIS 9 Perspectives on Severe Accident Mitigation Alternatives for U.S. Plant License Renewal, T. Gosh, R. Palla, D.
Helton, U.S NRC, Sept 2009 (Accession No.: ML092750488) 10 Nuclear Accident at Indian Point: Consequences and Costs, M. McKinzie, Oct 2011 (http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/indianpoint/files/NRDC-1336_IndianPointFSr8medium.pdf)
" Hazard Prediction and Assessment Capability (HPAC), version 4.0.4. Washington, D.C.: Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Apr 2004
and economic damages that would be incurred if a severe accident were to occur at Indian Point.
This is not a hypothetical issue. Policy makers in several countries, including Germany and Switzerland, have made decisions not to grant nuclear plant license extensions to avoid having to endure the continuing risk of severe nuclear plant accidents.
Regardless of Exelon's own corporate understanding of its legal obligations, NEPA is clear in its well-established mandates and what it requires of the NRC. NEPA requires that federal agencies characterize environmental impacts broadly to include not only ecological effects, such as physical, chemical, radiological and biological effects, but also aesthetic, historic, cultural, economic, and social effects.12 NEPA requires an agency to consider both the direct effects caused by an action and any indirect effects that are reasonably foreseeable. Effects include direct effects caused by the action and occurring at the same time and place and indirect effects caused by the action, but later in time or farther removed in distance, but still reasonably foreseeable.
Most specifically, NEPA directs that NRC take a "hard look" at the environmental impacts of its proposed action, in this instance the relicensing of two BWR Mark 2 units for an additional 20 years, and compare them to a full range of reasonable alternatives. "What constitutes a 'hard look' cannot be outlined with rule-like precision, but it at least encompasses a thorough investigation into the environmental impacts of an agency's action and a candid acknowledgement of the risks that those impacts entail." Nat 'l Audubon Soc. v. Dept of the Navy, 422 F.3d 174, 185 (4th Cir. 2005) (emphasis added). As a stalking horse for the NRC's draft EIS, the applicant's ER does not meet this standard. In taking the "hard look" required by law, the NRC must therefore address the potential environmental impacts of a range of severe accidents-and accident mitigation strategies-especially in light of the new information provided by the Fukushima nuclear disaster on the performance of BWR radiological containment in a prolonged loss-of-coolant, core-damage scenario.
For the reasons stated above, NRDC urges that NRC direct that a thorough and lawful SAMA analysis be conducted as part of (or supplement to) the required supplemental environmental impact statement, the draft of which is currently scheduled for August 2012 and the final SEIS currently scheduled for February 2013. Additionally, the full cumulative effect of severe accidents must be studied and presented as part of these documents. These analyses must make every effort to meet the current expectations of what these studies should encompass and use the necessary guidance and tools commonly utilized by the industry and NRC. The NRC's legal obligation to consider new information and determine its nuclear safety significance exists independently of whether a SAMA has or has not been prepared previously: in the event a SAMA has not been prepared, then new and potentially significant nuclear safety information must be included in the initial SAMA; if a previous SAMA exists, then it must be updated to reflect this new information, and the resulting costs and benefits of the full spectrum of reasonable accident mitigation alternatives must be considered as part of the Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, and issued for public comment.
Finally, we have grave misgivings regarding the future time-dependence, accuracy, and relevance of the licensee's current ER, as presumptively incorporated in the NRC's planned 12 40 C.F.R. § 1508.8
SEIS for LGS license extension, given that such license extension will not become effective until the current unit operating licenses expire in 2024 (for Unit 1) and 2029 for Unit 2. We submit that any decision to relicense these units must be supported by the most timely NEPA and SAMA analysis obtainable within a reasonable interval (e.g. five years) prior to actual expiration of the existing licenses.
Intervals of 12 and 17 years are not required for corporate planning purposes and are far too long to credibly sustain the accuracy and relevance of NEPA analyses, or for the NRC to accurately project both the future condition of the plant, the future state of nuclear safety knowledge, trends in local resource use, population, and the affected environment, and the future range of reasonable electricity supply alternatives to LGS license extension. By comparison, major government owned nuclear installations, such as nuclear laboratories and weapon production sites, are required to conduct site-wide NEPA reviews of their operations and facility plans every five years. Using this federal standard for timeliness, the NRC's NEPA analysis for LGS relicensing should not commence before 2019, for Unit 1, and before 2024 for Unit 2, or should be subjected to mandatory reassessment and supplementation after those dates.
We further note, given the extended timeframes for expiration of the existing LGS operating licenses, that they easily encompass the five year timeframe that the Commission has set out for formulation and implementation of NRC staff safety recommendations to be undertaken "without unnecessary delay" in the wake of the Fukushima accident. In light of these important nuclear safety developments, we seek no reason why this proposed NEPA analysis, and hence the entire licensing proceeding that it is required to support, could not be deferred for at least five years, until the Commission has completed its decision-making and schedule for implementation of post-Fukushima safety upgrades. As noted above, to ensure the timeliness and accuracy of the NEPA analysis, the deferral could be even longer (on the order of 7 years for Unit 1), to allow for the inclusion of the results of the extended rulemakings contemplated under the Commission's regulatory response to the Fukushima accident.
Preparation of the applicant's ER, and the NRC's subsequent SEIS, could then take account of these required safety modifications and enhanced severe accident coping strategies, and these would be reflected in a significantly revised SAMA analysis. In these comments, we are not formally advocating such a deferred pathway for the LGS relicensing proceeding, but merely note its plausibility and inherent advantages for all parties to the proceeding. Without such a deferral, the only sensible alternative course is to ensure the incorporation of the most up-to-date nuclear safety knowledge - "new and significant information" - regarding BWR Mark 2 reactors and severe accident mitigation into the current licensing proceeding.
Thank you for your consideration of these comments. Please do not hesitate to contact us at (202) 289-6868 if you have any questions.
Sincerely, Geoffrey Hiettus Senior Project Attorney C. Jordan Weaver, Ph.D.
Program Scientist Christopher E. Paine Director, Nuclear Program