19 legal challenges against relicensing of nuclear reactors

The contentions filed with the NRC address reactors at nuclear facilities nationwide, including 11 plants in the South: the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar plant in Rhea County, Tenn. and its Bellefonte plant in Hollywood, Ala.; SCE&G’s Summer plant near Jenkinsville, S.C.; NRG’s South Texas plant near Bay City; Luminant’s Comanche Peak plant southwest of Dallas; Southern Co./Georgia Power’s Vogtle plant in Burke County, Ga.; FP&L’s Turkey Point plant south of Miami; Progress Energy’s Levy County plant in Florida and its Shearon Harris plant in Wake County, N.C.; Dominion’s North Anna plant in Louisa County, Va.; and Duke Energy’s Lee plant in Cherokee County, S.C

Concerns grow over risk of U.S. nuclear projects post-Fukushima, Facing South, By Sue Sturgis on August 11, 2011 The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan is still unfolding five months later, with multiple meltdowns and significant radiation releases contaminating communities and farms downwind from the facility. Some nuclear experts are calling it “the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind.”

The Fukushima accident is also raising questions about the U.S. nuclear industry’s current plans to build new reactors and re-license old ones.
Today, environmental and public-interest advocacy groups filed 19 legal challenges that ask the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to put the brakes on reactor licensing until it fully incorporates into its regulatory process the lessons learned from Fukushima.

A total of 25 groups and several individuals filed the contentions with the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board. They cite the recently-released findings [pdf] of an NRC task force appointed to conduct an emergency review of the regulatory implications from the meltdowns and radioactive releases at TEPCO’s Fukushima plant. The review identified both systemic and specific problems in how NRC regulations protect the public, pointing to issues including seismic hazards, flooding, fires, station blackouts, hydrogen gas production, the vulnerability of spent-fuel pools, and multi-reactor accidents…..

The contentions filed today make the case that the substantial health and safety concerns identified by the NRC’s Fukushima review must be considered under the National Environmental Policy Act, a law that requires all federal agencies to prepare environmental impact statements for any planned actions. Issuing new licenses or re-licensing reactors before completing supplemental environmental impact statements that account for Fukushima’s lessons, they argue, would be illegal.

“Federal law does not allow the NRC commissioners to ignore those warnings in order to accommodate the nuclear industry,” said Jim Warren, executive director of the North Carolina-based energy watchdog group NC WARN, one of the groups behind the filings….