Other ways to comment:

You can send by email including the docket number in the subject line: "Docket ID NRC-2021-0137-0001" to:

NRC-EJReview@nrc.gov

Or you can upload them here: https://www.regulations.gov/document/NRC-2021-0137-0001

Please tell the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) how it can expand environmental justice throughout its programs, policies, and activities by sharing your story with the NRC. What has been your and your community’s experience with the NRC been like?

The following legal points were compiled by Caroline Reiser, NRDC staff attorney.

Some background points you might include in your comments:

• The NRC must follow the Biden Administration’s promise to deliver environmental justice. In his recent executive order, President Biden directed that “[a]gencies shall make achieving environmental justice part of their missions by developing programs, policies, and activities to address the disproportionately high and adverse human health, environmental, climate-related and other cumulative impacts on disadvantaged communities, as well as the accompanying economic challenges of such impacts.” https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/01/27/executive-order-on-tackling-the-climate-crisis-at-home-and-abroad/.  
• The NRC’s mission requires the agency to consider and address environmental justice more fully and deeply. The NRC’s mission is to “license and regulate the Nation’s civilian use of radioactive materials to provide reasonable assurance of adequate protection of public health and safety and to promote the common defense and security and to protect the environment.” Providing protection of public health and safety must include ensuring that the most vulnerable communities are not disproportionately impacted.
• The NRC must consider the environmental justice impacts of the full nuclear fuel chain. The nuclear fuel chain includes many steps, from uranium mining, milling, conversion, enrichment, and fuel fabrication to energy production, waste storage, treatment, transportation, and disposal. The NRC currently keeps the consideration of these steps, and their impacts, in distinct silos. But a single community can bear the burden from multiple stages of the nuclear fuel chain and the NRC should take into account these cumulative burdens in their environmental justice analyses. The NRC must look at the impacts of the nuclear cycle beyond radiation.
• The NRC should look to the 17 Principles of Environmental Justice in defining what environmental justice means for the agency. http://www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.pdf Environmental justice means fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. It means providing both procedural and substantive protections. It means actually addressing environmental injustices, including environmental burdens disproportionately held by low-income communities and communities of color, and it also means including stakeholders that have typically been excluded from the decision-making process.
• The NRC must take this opportunity to update the NRC’s Commission Policy Statement on the Treatment of Environmental Justice. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/commission/policy/69fr52040.pdf. And, unlike in drafting the 2004 Commission Policy Statement for which the NRC simply affirmed existing inadequate NRC practices, the process for creating a new policy statement must itself embrace basic principles of environmental justice. The NRC must create an inclusive process that recognizes and hears from impacted communities and does not ignore public input.
• The NRC must incorporate environmental justice beyond the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The NRC is wrong to claim that the only existing law relevant to the agency’s environmental justice conduct is NEPA. The Atomic Energy Act has health and safety sections that the NRC should also use to address environmental justice. The NRC should broadly use these sections, including to consider environmental justice in every licensing action and to analyze the environmental justice impacts of its policies and regulations
• The NRC must improve how it analyses environmental justice in its NEPA reviews. Simply disclosing the demographics and socioeconomic makeup of an affected community is not sufficient to satisfy environmental justice requirements under NEPA. Analyzing environmental justice also includes considering the economic burdens an action will have, such as lowering property values and disrupting business opportunities. Further, environmental justice analyses should be included in all NEPA documents, including every environmental assessment and generic and programmatic environmental impact statements.
• The NRC should expand mechanisms to gather public input. The NRC should make a permanent position or board with the responsibility both to expand how NRC addresses environmental justice throughout the agency and to be responsible for ensuring output to impacted communities. The NRC also should expand how it conducts outreach, especially to areas without easy access to the internet. This includes proactively reaching out to state and local government leaders, as well as recognized community leaders; producing information in multiple languages; and posting public notices more broadly, for example in newspapers and through local radio stations.
• The NRC should create mandatory trainings for its staff on environmental justice and related topics such as diversity, equity, and inclusion.