Oyster Creek Owner Wants To Significantly Reduce Emergency Planning Procedures After Plant Closes

LACEY TOWNSHIP, NJ - The owner of the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station is asking the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission for permission to significantly revise the plant's emergency plan a year after it closes in late 2019.

Exelon says the fuel in the plant's fuel in the spent fuel pool will have cooled enough to "significantly" reduce the risk of a fire in the pool that could release radioactivity into the environment, NRC spokesman Neil R. Sheehan said.

The changes Exelon is asking the NRC for include:

- Ending the 10-mile emergency planning zone around Oyster Creek.

- Eliminating emergency sirens in the emergency planning zone

- Eliminating the need for full-scale emergency exercises, which are currently conducted every two years.

- A large reduction in emergency response staff

- Ending the dissemination of emergency plan information to the public

- Ending the need for multiple emergency response facilities

If the NRC approves the request, the changes would take place in January of 2021, 12 months after the plant closes.

"Exelon has performed analyses which show that 12 months after permanent cessation of power operations, the spent fuel stored in the spent fuel pool will have decayed to the extent that the requested exemptions may be implemented at OCNGS without any additional compensatory actions," said Michael P. Gallagher, Exelon's Vice President of License Renewal and Decommissioning in a recent letter to the NRC.

Reducing the number of emergency responses after Oyster Creek closes would benefit public health and safety by enabling emergency personnel to respond to "credible scenarios," Exelon said.

"However, once the station is permanently shut down and defueled, and a sufficient decay of the spent fuel has occurred in a state of decommissioning, some of these requirements exceed what is necessary to protect the health and safety of the public," the letter states.

Exelon wants to revise Oyster Creek's emergency plan to "reflect the permanently defueled condition of the station."

Keeping the current emergency plan after the nuclear plant closes would also create a hardship on the Oyster Creek Decommissioning Trust fund, Exelon says.

The company is seeking an NRC decision on the request within 18 months, or by Feb. 22, 2019.

The NRC staff has reviewed similar requests for other permanently shutdown nuclear power plants, Sheehan said.

Oyster Creek is the oldest nuclear plant in the United States. It went online on Dec. 23, 1969.

Photo: Patch file photo, second photo by Patricia A. Miller