The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has decided to consider a petition that seeks a two-year backup power supply for spent fuel pools at American nuclear plants in the event that a solar storm destroys the country's electrical infrastructure.
The agency will begin a formal rulemaking process to address a 2011 petition submitted by Thomas Popik of the New Hampshire-based Foundation for Resilient Societies, according to a notice in the Federal Register Tuesday. The petition argued that the electrical grid is vulnerable to "prolonged outage caused by extreme space weather, such as coronal mass ejections and associated geomagnetic disturbances and therefore cannot be relied on to provide continual power for active cooling and/or water makeup of SFPs."
Accordingly, Popik's petition sought independent SFP safety systems that can operate for two years without human intervention or offsite fuel.
The NRC is already studying SFP cooling during extended station blackouts caused by beyond-design-basis accidents as part of its response to the Fukushima Daiichi crisis in Japan. Current regulations do not account for such a prolonged grid failure. The agency reported that, should post-Fukushima regulations not address the diesel generator fuel supply issues that could arise following an extreme solar storm, the NRC will explore whether there is a regulatory basis to write new safety rules related to such an event.
The agency also noted that, unrelated to the petition, it has also begun updating its evaluation of the possible effects of a solar storm on nuclear plant safety systems.