Comment of Savannah River Site Watch, at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Public Meeting on MOX Plant Construction Regulation, New Ellenton, SC (adjacent to SRS), January 15, 2015
The meeting included an NRC presentation on why a 10-year license extension, to 2025, was given for the MOX project. The NRC should have been more thorough in its review of the license extension request and should have delved into the reasons for the massive cost overruns and schedule delays, including if safety is being impact by chronic budget stresses on the project. But at least the NRC did interact with the public at the meeting, something that mangers of the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and CB&I AREVA MOX Services dare not do given that their abhorrence of the public is a key strategy in their cover-up of MOX mismanagement.
Is the NRC’s 10-Year License Extension for the MOX Plant Construction a Prelude for More Delays?
“As most aspects of the U.S. Department of Energy’s troubled MOX program are being hidden from the public, as part of an apparent cover-up by DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration and its contractors, a public meeting on the role of the NRC in regulating the MOX plant construction is welcome.”
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“As the NRC has taken into account the problems outside its scope in reviewing the status of the license, it is incumbent upon the NRC to now reveal just when it thinks that the project will be concluded within the additional 10 years it has allotted for construction. At the outside, only a few years’ extension was warranted and one must wonder why a full decade’s extension was allowed when the project supposedly should be finished within 5 years from now. The NRC must have an idea that given the problems we have seen to this point that more such problems can be anticipated. The 10-year license extension thus appears to have put the NRC in the position of simply accepting that more construction delays are inevitable.”