SEABROOK — The road to extending the operating license for the Seabrook Station nuclear power plant until 2050 just got a little easier.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced March 8 that it has tossed out three contentions to that extension filed by nuclear safety groups that had previously been accepted for adjudication by the commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board.
"This rejection of our intervener status is a complete outrage," said Doug Bogen, executive director of the Exeter-based Seacoast Anti-Pollution League, one of the organizations that had filed a contention against the license extension that the NRC rejected. "The NRC's action is all the more heinous in that it comes just a few days before the anniversary of the Fukushima disaster — an event which should have shaken the foundations of nuclear regulation, but appears to have caused barely a tremor."
SAPL's contention, filed along with the Washington, D.C.-based organization Beyond Nuclear and the New Hampshire Sierra Club, was that the Environmental Report used to justify the license extension filed by NextEra Energy, the operators of the Seabrook plant, failed to evaluate the potential for renewable energy to offset the loss of energy production from the Seabrook nuclear power plant when its current license expires in 2030. The nuclear safety groups argued that new energy technologies in the works would make the power generated by Seabrook Station unnecessary.
The NRC overruled its licensing board's decision that this contention had merit. In doing so, the commission effectively removed these three organizations from the license renewal process.
"As we have discussed, in assessing energy-alternatives contentions, practicality requires us to consider chiefly, often exclusively, alternatives that can be shown to have viability today or in the near future," the NRC wrote in its March 8 order. "Here, Beyond Nuclear (SAPL and the Sierra Club have) not provided support for (the) claim that offshore wind is technically feasible and commercially viable — either today or in the near future — and, therefore, has not submitted an admissible contention."
The NRC decision angered SAPL President Herb Moyer, who claimed the ruling violated federal law.
"One moniker for the NRC is 'Nobody Really Cares;' another is 'No Real Consideration,'" Moyer said. "(The commission's) decision to discard SAPL's legal contention that a license extension requires consideration of future power alternatives is illogical, irrational and contrary to the law embodied in the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969."
NRC Public Affairs Officer Neil Sheehan said that while he would not call the commission's decision to override its own licensing board unusual, "in general, the commission tends to support decisions reached by ASLB unless there are compelling reasons to do otherwise, recognizing that the ASLB heard all of the testimony and carefully scrutinized all of the relevant information."
The decision to toss out the SAPL contention, along with two others filed jointly by the Maine-based Friends of the Coast and the New England Coalition in Massachusetts, leaves only two left for final judgment by the licensing board. Both were filed by the Coalition and Friends groups.
The first claims that the Severe Accident Mitigation Alternatives report submitted by NextEra as part of its license extension request minimized the potential amount of radiation that could be released by the Seabrook plant in a severe accident. While the commission was obviously displeased that the ASLB accepted this contention, adjudication of this issue was allowed to go forward.
"Although we consider, as we said previously, that support for this contention is weak, because the (licensing) board is the appropriate arbiter of such fact-specific questions of contention admissibility, we will not second-guess the board's evaluation of factual support for the contention, absent an error of law or abuse of discretion," the NRC wrote.
The last contention allowed had to do with the claim that NextEra used a faulty modeling process to determine how air currents along the coast would disperse any radioactivity released from the Seabrook plant in the event of a severe accident.
"Here, the board held that (the) Friends/NEC have raised plausible limitations of air dispersion modeling at the (Seabrook) site, and that the asserted limitations of the atmospheric dispersion model plausibly could affect the SAMA cost-benefit conclusions," the commission wrote in the March 8 order. "Given the substantial deference we typically accord licensing boards on contention admissibility, we conclude that the board did not abuse its discretion or commit legal error in finding adequate factual support for the contention."
No date has yet been set for a hearing on these two remaining contentions.
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