Resolution of Generic Safety Issues: Item A-27: Reload Applications (Rev. 1) ( NUREG-0933, Main Report with Supplements 1–35 )
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DESCRIPTION
By letter dated June 18, 1975, licensees of operating reactor facilities were sent a preliminary copy of a staff paper, "Guidance for Proposed License Amendments Relating to Refueling," and "Refueling Information Request Form." The purpose was to provide guidance, although preliminary, to licensees on what information the staff considers to be essential for the conduct of its review of core reload submittals. In order to add more predictability to the review process and to improve the staff scheduling of such reviews, licensees were asked to submit the Refueling Information Request data within 30 days after receipt of the letter and were requested to update the information annually thereafter (or more often if appropriate).
The purpose of this NUREG-03712 task is to: (1) update the preliminary guidance issued to licensees in the June 18, 1975 letter to assure conformance with the latest staff technical positions that relate to core reloads, and (2) prepare formal review procedures to assure prompt and uniform review of the licensee reload submittals. Revision of procedures for review of reloads is an important task in order to assure that projected staffing levels will be sufficient to accommodate future reload reviews. Under the present system of individualized reload reviews, the staff level for reload reviews would have to grow proportional to the number of facilities being licensed.
With regard to updating our guidance to licensees, providing licensees with uniform and up-to-date information on our criteria will help to make the review process more orderly and predictable. Ultimately, standardizing the review process will encourage licensees to plan reloads which do not require prior NRC approval and thus will serve to reduce our staffing commitment to reload reviews. Once uniform criteria in the form of the BTP have been developed for use with operating reactors, then a reexamination of the OL stage of licensing will be made to determine if any incentives to licensees exist which would encourage evaluation of reloads prior to receipt of the OL. This would have the effect of allowing the licensee to perform reloads according to certain specifications without NRC approval beyond granting of the OL. In addition, the revised guidance would further underscore our interest in early identification of non-reload related activities which often take place during refueling outages and which require Commission review.
CONCLUSION
This Licensing Issue was intended to provide a comprehensive guidance document for use by technical reviewers in considering applications for core reloads. A draft Regulatory Guide was issued for comment in September 1979 but was never issued in final form. An NRR Task Force to Address Licensing Reload Reviews reported on November 19, 1981, and recommended preparation of a new Regulatory Guide.412
As a part of the improvements to NUREG-0933, the NRC staff clarified in SECY-11-0101, "Summary of Activities Related to Generic Issues Program," dated July 26, 2011,1967 that the Generic Issues Program will not pursue any further actions toward resolution of licensing and regulatory impact issues. Because licensing and regulatory impact issues are not safety issues by the classification guidance in the legacy Generic Issues Program, these issues do not meet at least one of the Generic Issues Program screening criteria and do not warrant further processing in accordance with Management Directive 6.4, "Generic Issues Program," dated November 17, 2009.1858 Therefore, this issue will not be pursued any further in the Generic Issues Program.
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