Office of Nuclear Materials Safety and Safeguards

The NRC develops regulatory and cost-benefit analysis documents to support its implementation of its policies. The NRC staff recently completed Revision 5 of NUREG/BR-0058, “Regulatory Analysis Guidelines of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.” NUREG/BR-0058 presents standardized methods for agency wide use in preparing regulatory and cost-benefit analyses, providing insight and transparency for NRC stakeholders. The process of updating the main body of guidance and creating appendices on specialized topics occurred in three stages. The entire suite of revised guidance is with the Commission for approval to issue.

In a related effort, the NRC published Revision 1 of NUREG-1530, “Reassessment of NRC’s Dollar Per Person-Rem Conversion Factor Policy,” in February 2022.  Revision 1 of NUREG-1530 updates the dollar per person-rem conversion factor, a standard component of NRC’s regulatory analyses and one that the NRC uses to determine the monetary valuation of the consequences associated with radiological exposures. The NRC also established a method for keeping this factor up to date.

In the course of this update, the NRC removed morbidity as one input variable used to calculate the dollar per person-rem conversion factor. To provide its analysts with a method for valuing morbidity to demonstrate the quantitative effect of nonfatal risks in its cost benefit analyses, the NRC developed an appendix to NUREG/BR-0058 dedicated to morbidity valuation.

The staff also developed a new appendix that provides NRC analysts with a methodology for calculating the replacement energy costs that are often a key attribute of a cost benefit analysis. These costs are most commonly identified or used as an attribute within two separate categories: industry implementation costs or averted onsite property costs.

NUREG-2242, "Replacement Energy Cost Estimates for Nuclear Power Plants: 2020 2030,” issued June 2021, provides the basis for calculating these costs. The NRC staff and contractors estimated replacement energy costs for the U.S. wholesale electricity market regions with nuclear electricity generating units over the 2020-2030 report period. Analysts use these estimates to evaluate proposed regulatory actions that (1) require safety modifications that might necessitate temporary reactor outages and (2) reduce the potential for the loss of generation associated with a possible severe reactor accident.

The NRC’s updated guidance documents account for changes that have occurred in the electrical generation and transmission markets, including the deregulation of electricity generation markets in several U.S. States and in the electricity transmission market.