Making Practicability the Standard for Uranium Groundwater Restoration

In situ recovery (ISR) extracts uranium by circulating a chemical solution through an underground ore body, changing groundwater chemistry that the operator must later restore. Since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) rules for this were written mainly for conventional uranium mills, ISR sites have relied on conditions written into individual licenses. The proposed rule would codify groundwater protection requirements for ISR and revise decommissioning timeliness requirements.

This rule is part of the NRC’s wholesale revision of its regulatory framework following Executive Order 14300, and an opportunity to update uranium recovery regulation. BTI supports both objectives: replacing license-by-license conditions with consistent requirements, and giving licensees more flexibility to manage periods of inactivity without compromising safety.

BTI’s main concern is that restoration has no clear endpoint. The rule lets a licensee request an alternate concentration limit (ACL) when approved limits cannot practically be reached, recognizing that treating groundwater eventually yields diminishing returns. The companion draft guidance expects something different: restoration to “the lowest possible” level. That language has no stopping point, so a licensee could be asked for more cleanup even when more work would change little. The guidance would also accept a radiological ACL where further cleanup costs more than $5,200 per person-rem avoided. That test, borrowed from traditional “as low as reasonably achievable” practice, prices the total dose to an exposed population, even though the guidance itself says the production unit is not a point of human exposure. BTI recommends that the final guidance follow the rule’s practicability standard, explain how a licensee shows that further restoration is not practicable, and set a de minimis dose level, developed with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), below which further cleanup is not required.

The final rule should resolve its connections to other standards rather than leave them to later dockets. Replacing the current groundwater concentration limits with cross-references to EPA standards would change several of them, tightening the arsenic limit fivefold while relaxing the barium limit twofold. The NRC should acknowledge those changes and use the EPA concurrence the law already requires to put groundwater limits and ACL criteria on a shared technical basis. The NRC should also reconcile this rule’s amendments with the radiation protection rule, since both revise the same introductory text, and rely on the categorical exclusion as it appears in the final National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) rule. With a defined endpoint and requirements that work consistently across these rulemakings, the final rule would give operators a clear target and regulators a basis for deciding when a site is restored.