[Federal Register Volume 73, Number 102 (Tuesday, May 27, 2008)]
[Proposed Rules]
[Pages 30321-30322]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: E8-11727]


 ========================================================================
 Proposed Rules
                                                 Federal Register
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 This section of the FEDERAL REGISTER contains notices to the public of 
 the proposed issuance of rules and regulations. The purpose of these 
 notices is to give interested persons an opportunity to participate in 
 the rule making prior to the adoption of the final rules.
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  Federal Register / Vol. 73, No. 102 / Tuesday, May 27, 2008 / 
Proposed Rules  

[[Page 30321]]



NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION

10 CFR Part 50

[Docket No. PRM-50-90; NRC-2008-0279]


Natural Resources Defense Council; Receipt of Petition for 
Rulemaking

AGENCY: Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

ACTION: Petition for rulemaking; Notice of receipt.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

SUMMARY: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has received and 
requests public comment on a petition for rulemaking dated March 24, 
2008, filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (petitioner). The 
petition was docketed by the NRC and has been assigned Docket No. PRM-
50-90. The petitioner is requesting that the NRC amend the regulations 
that govern domestic licensing of production and utilization 
facilities, and special nuclear material to establish a date when the 
NRC will no longer license the use or export of highly enriched uranium 
(HEU) except for restricted use by a few specialized facilities. The 
petitioner believes that the amendment is needed to protect the public 
from potential exposure to an improvised nuclear explosive device made 
with HEU and used by terrorists.

DATES: Submit comments by August 11, 2008. Comments received after this 
date will be considered if it is practical to do so, but assurance of 
consideration cannot be given except as to comments received on or 
before this date.

ADDRESSES: You may submit comments by any one of the following methods. 
Please include the following number (PRM-50-90) in the subject line of 
your comments. Comments on petitions submitted in writing or in 
electronic form will be made available for public inspection. Personal 
information, such as your name, address, telephone number, e-mail 
address, etc., will not be removed from your submission.
    Mail comments to: Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 
Washington, DC 20555. Attention: Rulemaking and Adjudications staff.
    E-mail comments to: [email protected]. If you do not 
receive a reply e-mail confirming that we have received your comments, 
contact us directly at (301) 415-1677. Comments can also be submitted 
via the Federal eRulemaking Portal http:www.regulations.gov.
    Hand deliver comments to: 11555 Rockville Pike, Rockville, 
Maryland, between 7:30 am and 4:15 pm on Federal workdays.
    Publicly available documents related to this petition may be viewed 
electronically on the public computers located at the NRC Public 
Document Room (PDR), Room O1 F21, One White Flint North, 11555 
Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland. The PDR reproduction contractor 
will copy documents for a fee.
    Publicly available documents created or received at the NRC after 
November 1, 1999 are also available electronically at the NRC's 
Electronic Reading Room at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html. 
From this site, the public can gain entry into the NRC's Agencywide 
Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS), which provides text and 
image files of NRC's public documents. If you do not have access to 
ADAMS or if there are problems in accessing the documents located in 
ADAMS, contact the NRC PDR Reference staff at 1-800-397-4209, 301-415-
4737 or by e-mail to [email protected].
    For a copy of the petition, write to Michael T. Lesar, Chief, 
Rulemaking, Directives and Editing Branch, Division of Administrative 
Services, Office of Administration, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 
Washington, DC 20555-0001. The petition is also available 
electronically in ADAMS at ML080940052.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Michael T. Lesar, Office of 
Administration, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 
20555. Telephone: 301-415-7163 or Toll-Free: 1-800-368-5642 or E-mail: 
[email protected].

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:

Background

    The NRC has received a petition for rulemaking dated March 24, 
2008, submitted by the Natural Resources Defense Council (petitioner). 
The petitioner requests that the NRC amend 10 CFR part 50, ``Domestic 
Licensing of Production and Utilization Facilities;'' 10 CFR part 70, 
``Domestic Licensing of Special Nuclear Material'' and other applicable 
regulations. Specifically, the petitioner requests that 10 CFR 50.64, 
``Limitations on the use of highly enriched uranium (HEU) in domestic 
non-power reactors'' and portions of Part 70 that govern licensing of 
production of calibration or reference sources be amended to establish 
a date when the NRC will no longer license the civilian use of HEU. The 
petitioner also requests that applicable regulations governing export 
of HEU be amended to establish a time table to prohibit further 
transport and use of HEU.
    The NRC has determined that the petition meets the threshold 
sufficiency requirements for a petition for rulemaking under 10 CFR 
2.802. The petition was docketed by the NRC as PRM-50-90 on April 1, 
2008. The NRC is soliciting public comment on the petition for 
rulemaking.

Discussion of the Petition

    The petitioner requests that the NRC establish a date to no longer 
license the civilian use of HEU. The petitioner states that the basis 
for this request is bolstered by an article written by Thomas B. 
Cochran and Matthew G. McKinzie, ``Detecting Nuclear Smuggling,'' that 
appears in the April 2008 edition of Scientific American magazine. The 
petitioner states that the NRC should not license civilian use of HEU 
after December 31, 2009 (or an alternative date) except for use as 
reactor fuel at the MITR-II facility at the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology (MIT), the Heavy Water Test Reactor at the National 
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the MURR facility at 
the University of Missouri. The petitioner also states that these 
facilities should be required to work with the NRC to establish dates 
when these reactors must be converted to low enriched uranium (LEU) 
fuel and report annually to NRC the progress toward fuel conversion.
    The petitioner also requests that the NRC establish a date when HEU 
can no

[[Page 30322]]

longer be exported, citing the export of HEU to licensees in Canada for 
Mo-99/Tc-99m medical isotope production during the past five years. The 
petitioner states that a ban on the NRC-licensed civilian use and 
export of HEU should apply to all facilities except for blending down 
of existing HEU to LEU fuel for civilian power reactors and to lower 
concentrations (20 to 40 percent U-235) of HEU for use at the MIT, 
NIST, and MURR facilities. The petitioner also states that HEU used for 
weapons and naval propulsion reactor fuel, spent fuel and radioactive 
waste regulated by 10 CFR part 72, the use of HEU under exemptions in 
Sec. Sec.  70.11-70.17, and small quantities for production of 
calibration or references sources covered under Sec. Sec.  70.19 and 
70.20 should remain exempt from the proposed amendment.
    The petitioner believes its proposed amendment will establish ``an 
urgently needed precedent that HEU is simply too dangerous for 
continued commercial use.'' The petitioner also states that other 
countries will not likely ban civilian use of HEU as long as similar 
use of HEU is permitted in the U.S. and would signal other countries 
``the imperative of eliminating vulnerable sources of HEU.'' The 
petitioner further states that eliminating civilian HEU use is 
absolutely necessary because the greatest threat to the U.S. is the 
risk that terrorists will use HEU to make an improvised nuclear 
explosive device.
    The petitioner notes that it is very easy to construct an 
improvised nuclear explosive device with HEU in sufficient quantities 
and that assembly instructions for these devices are widely available 
by computer. The petitioner states that a one-kiloton surface burst 
from a nuclear explosion can produce comparable casualties at some U.S. 
locations as the 21-kiloton airburst over Nagasaki, Japan during World 
War II. The petitioner is also concerned that HEU cannot be reliably 
detected by radiation portal monitors currently used at ports and other 
border crossings, and that monitors are useless if bypassed in noting 
that millions of illegal aliens and much contraband have entered the 
U.S. The petitioner states that eliminating HEU at its source should be 
this country's highest priority because of the high national security 
risk and that existing Federal programs are moving far too slowly to 
combat the threat.
    The petitioner also notes that no commercial U.S. power reactors 
use HEU fuel and that no future plans to use HEU in NRC-licensed power 
facilities exist. The petitioner further states that NRC continues to 
license the civilian use of HEU to fuel seven existing research and 
test reactors that have not converted to LEU fuel yet, citing the NRC-
licensed BWXT Lynchburg Technology Center that manufactures reactor 
fuel for several of these reactors. The petitioner is not aware of any 
other civilian use of HEU other than for the export to Canada for use 
in producing Molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) for Technetium-99m (Tc-99m) 
production, the most widely used medical isotope.
    The petitioner states that 10 CFR 50.64 prohibits continued use of 
HEU fuel in domestic non-power reactors if an LEU fuel alternative is 
available. The petitioner estimates that the three HEU-fueled TRIGA-
type research reactors at Oregon State University, the University of 
Wisconsin and Washington State University, will be converted to LEU 
during the next two years. The petitioner also notes that the MIST, 
NIST, and MURR facilities are working with the Department of Energy 
(DOE) to develop LEU alternatives but is skeptical that DOE's estimate 
to convert these facilities will occur by 2014. The petitioner does not 
know if the only other facility in the U.S., a small (100 megawatt-
thermal) Nuclear Test Reactor (NTR) at General Electric's Vallectios 
Nuclear Center used for radiography is scheduled for conversion but 
notes that the newer and larger LEU-fueled TRIGA facility at the 
McClellan Nuclear Radiation Center is also used for radiography.
    The petitioner notes that the NTR is a joint venture of General 
Electric Company (GE) and Hitachi and has been permitted to continue to 
operate on HEU fuel by annually certifying to the NRC that DOE does not 
have the funding for conversion to LEU. The petitioner states that 
because GE and Hitachi can afford to promptly convert the NTR to LEU 
fuel without Federal support, the NTR should be shut down before it is 
refueled if these firms believe the conversion is not worth the 
investment. The petitioner also notes that NRC has authorized a two to 
three year supply of HEU for export to Canada for Mo-99/Tc-99m medical 
isotope production. The petitioner suggests that the Canadian firm, MDS 
Nordion, that extracts the Mo-99/Tc-99m from the HEU could use LEU 
material because at least two other Mo-99 producers have been doing so 
``for more than 30 years.'' Although MDS Nordion would incur an 
additional expense associated with the conversion, the petitioner 
believes it would be ``a small price to pay for the elimination of 
HEU.''
    The petitioner does not believe that establishing a firm date for 
ending civilian use of HEU will be detrimental to medical isotope 
production. However, the petitioner suggests that the NRC could 
authorize use of 20 to 40 percent-enriched HEU for a limited time if 
evidence is presented that complete elimination of HEU would not be 
practical for the MURR and MDC Nordion facilities. The petitioner 
states that a ``reduction from 93.5 percent enriched-HEU to 40 percent 
would only increase the target material requirement for Mo-99 
production by a factor of about 2.3.'' The petitioner also states that 
approximately four times more 40 percent-enriched HEU would be required 
to make a one-kiloton improvised nuclear explosive device than using 
93.5 percent enriched-HEU.
    The petitioner concludes that because there is no known civilian 
use of HEU, including use as reactor fuel or for medical isotope 
production, that cannot be performed by using LEU, and that the high 
national security risks of HEU use clearly outweigh the benefits, the 
NRC should no longer license the civilian use and export of HEU.
    The petitioner requests that the NRC conduct a rulemaking to 
establish the proposed amendments as detailed in this petition for 
rulemaking.

    Dated at Rockville, Maryland, this 20th day of May 2008.

    For the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Annette L. Vietti-Cook,
Secretary of the Commission.
[FR Doc. E8-11727 Filed 5-23-08; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 7590-01-P