The nuclear industry is attempting to push through a "rush job" on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's redo of waste policies so pending license applications and renewals aren't delayed, watchdog groups charged today.

The Nuclear Energy Institute signaled its support earlier this month for NRC's proposed two-year timeline for revising its spent fuel storage policies, which a federal appeals court found lacking last year.

The court ruled that the commission failed to fully analyze the environmental effects of storing nuclear waste at sites across the country without a permanent repository under construction (Greenwire, Jan. 4).

The court faulted NRC for not taking a close enough look at spent fuel pool fires and for assuming a national repository would be built within the next 60 years, despite decades of political deadlock over the abandoned repository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The court then vacated both the agency's waste confidence decision and a separate storage rule.

In response, NRC began reviewing its policies and declared its intent to issue a final environmental impact statement and waste confidence rule by August 2014. The agency also decided to hold off on approving licenses for new nuclear plants or renewing the licenses of existing facilities, because the waste confidence rule underlies those decisions.

But Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear waste expert at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, said in comments filed with NRC today that the agency will need at least a decade to gather sufficient data to determine how long spent fuel can be stored at various sites across the country.

"Two years simply doesn't allow the data to be gathered because the data still doesn't exist on most of the essential points," he told reporters on a call today.

Makhijani also said NEI was "wrong on a number of accounts" in its comments to NRC, including its assumption that the effects of shuttering Yucca Mountain can be calculated.

Diane Curran, an attorney at Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg LLP, said another problem is that information about fires at spent fuel pools is classified after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the agency needs to find a way to make that data public. "There's no reason why this issue should continue to be secret," she said.

The groups reiterated their point that NRC staff members in the past have said it could take up to seven years to revise nuclear waste storage policies. NRC has since said that estimate was tied to a different project with two staffers assigned to it, whereas the waste confidence ruling has the attention of 20 full-time staffers.

"They could put 500 staffers on this and not do it in two years because they need a physical research program," Makhijani said.

Ellen Ginsberg, vice president and general counsel of NEI, said the industry supports the schedule established by the nuclear commission, which "allows both a full review of the issues identified by the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and a timely resolution of the rulemaking process."

"Maintaining this schedule is an essential objective, since the Commission will not make final licensing decisions on pending license applications dependent upon the WCD until the remanded issues are resolved," Ginsberg said.