It’s unlikely the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission will grant a citizen coalition’s request to temporarily shut down the Oyster Creek nuclear plant in Lacey Township on April 9, the day its license expires.
Oyster Creek will still be producing power after the license expiration, NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said.
“Right now, they still have this exemption in place that allows them to continue to operate until there is a final decision by the commission,” he said.
The NRC allows business entities that apply with at least five years left on their operating licenses to continue until there is a final decision on the license renewal application.
AmerGen Energy Co., which has since transferred ownership to Exelon, its subsidiary, did not have the requisite five years, but was granted an exemption in December 2004 to allow it to continue to function after the license expires, Sheehan said.
“As a result of that, they are allowed to continue to operate,” Sheehan said.
Coalition attorney Richard Webster said in a March 24 letter to Samuel J. Collins, the NRC’s Region 1 administrator, that Exelon had failed to meet a license condition and failed to provide an application for license renewal that was timely and sufficient.
“Oyster Creek must temporarily cease power production on April 9, 2009, unless the commission acts on the pending request for license renewal before that date, Webster said in the letter.
Webster represents the members of Stop the Relicensing of Oyster Creek [STROC], which includes the Nuclear Information and Resource Service Inc., Jersey Shore Nuclear Watch Inc., Grandmothers, Mothers and More for Energy Safety, New Jersey Public Interest Research Group, New Jersey Sierra Club and the New Jersey Environmental Federation.
Sheehan doesn’t expect NRC commissioners to hold a voting session on the license on April 9.
“They certainly would give people advance notice they were going to have a voting session on this,” he said. “They would not put that on the schedule at the last minute.”
Webster also requested that an “exit meeting” between the NRC and Exelon to discuss the results of the latest plant inspection be open to the public and that coalition representatives be notified of the meeting a week in advance.
Exit meetings are held after inspections done during refueling outages and are usually held in private, since there is often little public interest, Sheehan said.
“We discuss them with the utility,” he said. “There’s usually not a very high level of interest. They’re very technical in nature. There’s no good reason or purpose to discuss it in a public setting.”
Webster agrees that exit meetings are generally closed, unless it’s a matter of “high public interest.”
“I trust you will not attempt to deny that the situation at Oyster Creek is a significant case of high public interest …” he said in the letter.
Webster said he had tried to attend an exit meeting last fall and was told he could not sit in.
“They additionally said we’ll think about it,” he said. “Then I found out they changed it to another time.”
“We had some correspondence with Richard Webster in which we explained the reasons,” Sheehan said. “We evaluate every exit meeting. We didn’t think it met that threshold.”
The coalition legally challenged the integrity of the thickness of the nuclear plant’s drywell liner, the frequency of ultrasonic tests in the drywell’s sand bed region and its future corrosion rate. The challenge ended up in the hands of the
NRC’s Atomic Safety Licensing Board, which
held two days of public hearings on the contention in the fall of 2007.
The ASLB panel ruled it was safe for the plant to continue to operate, providing Exelon met the conditions for monitoring the drywell’s integrity, Sheehan said.
The coalition then filed another affidavit seeking to add another contention and reopen the record. The contention dealt with predictions of metal fatigue for the plant’s recirculation nozzles.
The ASLB voted 3 to 2 on July 24, 2008, that the citizens’ groups had failed to meet the exacting standards for reopening the record.
But ASLB Judge Anthony Baratta said in a dissenting opinion that he felt the coalition had met the standards.
“I conclude that the new information proffered by citizens’ evidence has properly raised an issue of serious safety significance had it been considered previously …” Baratta wrote in his opinion.
The appeal is now back before the NRC, Sheehan said.
The latest inspection dealt with a “lengthy list of commitments” Exelon must meet for license renewal, he said.
“We’re still discussing the best way to communicate those results,” he said.
Oyster Creek is the oldest operating nuclear plant in the United States. It went online in 1969. Exelon wants to operate the plant for another 20 years.