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DOE announces NEPA exclusion for advanced reactors
The Department of Energy has announced that it is establishing a categorical exclusion for the application of National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) procedures to the authorization, siting, construction, operation, reauthorization, and decommissioning of advanced nuclear reactors.
According to the DOE, this significant change, which goes into effect today, “is based on the experience of DOE and other federal agencies, current technologies, regulatory requirements, and accepted industry practice.”
L. El-Guebaly, D. Henderson, A. Abdou, P. Wilson, ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 39 | Number 2 | March 2001 | Pages 986-990
Safety and Environment | doi.org/10.13182/FST01-A11963370
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Over the past 10 years, the ARIES team has been devoting a serious effort to reduce the volume of radwaste generated by fusion power plants. Recently, an initiative was launched in the U.S. and Europe to reduce the radwaste volume further by clearing the outer components from regulatory control. Before proceeding further with the development of a new strategy for the U.S. fusion waste management, it is essential to assess the implication of the clearance option on the waste generated by the U.S. advanced power plants. In this paper, we discuss the results of the analysis, the approach adopted by the ARIES team for handling the cleared components, and the U.S. market for cleared metals. Our results state that, because of the compactness of the design, none of the ARIES-AT fusion power core components has a clearance index below one at the end of the 100 year interim storage period and all components should be either recycled or disposed near surface as low-level waste. At present, the U.S. industry has zero tolerance for metals with very low radiation level, meaning the commercial market for cleared metals does not exist.