(a) Quality Standards. Structures, systems, and components important to safety must be designed, fabricated, erected, and tested to quality standards commensurate with the importance to safety of the function to be performed.

(b) Protection against environmental conditions and natural phenomena.

(1) Structures, systems, and components important to safety must be designed to accommodate the effects of, and to be compatible with, site characteristics and environmental conditions associated with normal operation, maintenance, and testing of the ISFSI or MRS and to withstand postulated accidents.

(2)

(i) Structures, systems, and components important to safety must be designed to withstand the effects of natural phenomena such as earthquakes, tornadoes, lightning, hurricanes, floods, tsunami, and seiches, without impairing their capability to perform their intended design functions. The design bases for these structures, systems, and components must reflect:

(A) Appropriate consideration of the most severe of the natural phenomena reported for the site and surrounding area, with appropriate margins to take into account the limitations of the data and the period of time in which the data have accumulated, and

(B) Appropriate combinations of the effects of normal and accident conditions and the effects of natural phenomena.

(ii) The ISFSI or MRS also should be designed to prevent massive collapse of building structures or the dropping of heavy objects as a result of building structural failure on the spent fuel, high-level radioactive waste, or reactor-related GTCC waste or on to structures, systems, and components important to safety.

(3) Capability must be provided for determining the intensity of natural phenomena that may occur for comparison with design bases of structures, systems, and components important to safety.

(4) If the ISFSI or MRS is located over an aquifer which is a major water resource, measures must be taken to preclude the transport of radioactive materials to the environment through this potential pathway.

(c) Protection against fires and explosions. Structures, systems, and components important to safety must be designed and located so that they can continue to perform their safety functions effectively under credible fire and explosion exposure conditions. Noncombustible and heat-resistant materials must be used wherever practical throughout the ISFSI or MRS, particularly in locations vital to the control of radioactive materials and to the maintenance of safety control functions. Explosion and fire detection, alarm, and suppression systems shall be designed and provided with sufficient capacity and capability to minimize the adverse effects of fires and explosions on structures, systems, and components important to safety. The design of the ISFSI or MRS must include provisions to protect against adverse effects that might result from either the operation or the failure of the fire suppression system.

(d) Sharing of structures, systems, and components. Structures, systems, and components important to safety must not be shared between an ISFSI or MRS and other facilities unless it is shown that such sharing will not impair the capability of either facility to perform its safety functions, including the ability to return to a safe condition in the event of an accident.

(e) Proximity of sites. An ISFSI or MRS located near other nuclear facilities must be designed and operated to ensure that the cumulative effects of their combined operations will not constitute an unreasonable risk to the health and safety of the public.

(f) Testing and maintenance of systems and components. Systems and components that are important to safety must be designed to permit inspection, maintenance, and testing.

(g) Emergency capability. Structures, systems, and components important to safety must be designed for emergencies. The design must provide for accessibility to the equipment of onsite and available offsite emergency facilities and services such as hospitals, fire and police departments, ambulance service, and other emergency agencies.

(h) Confinement barriers and systems.

(1) The spent fuel cladding must be protected during storage against degradation that leads to gross ruptures or the fuel must be otherwise confined such that degradation of the fuel during storage will not pose operational safety problems with respect to its removal from storage. This may be accomplished by canning of consolidated fuel rods or unconsolidated assemblies or other means as appropriate.

(2) For underwater storage of spent fuel, high-level radioactive waste, or reactor-related GTCC waste in which the pool water serves as a shield and a confinement medium for radioactive materials, systems for maintaining water purity and the pool water level must be designed so that any abnormal operations or failure in those systems from any cause will not cause the water level to fall below safe limits. The design must preclude installations of drains, permanently connected systems, and other features that could, by abnormal operations or failure, cause a significant loss of water. Pool water level equipment must be provided to alarm in a continuously manned location if the water level in the storage pools falls below a predetermined level.

(3) Ventilation systems and off-gas systems must be provided where necessary to ensure the confinement of airborne radioactive particulate materials during normal or off-normal conditions.

(4) Storage confinement systems must have the capability for continuous monitoring in a manner such that the licensee will be able to determine when corrective action needs to be taken to maintain safe storage conditions. For dry spent fuel storage, periodic monitoring is sufficient provided that periodic monitoring is consistent with the dry spent fuel storage cask design requirements. The monitoring period must be based upon the spent fuel storage cask design requirements.

(5) The high-level radioactive waste and reactor-related GTCC waste must be packaged in a manner that allows handling and retrievability without the release of radioactive materials to the environment or radiation exposures in excess of part 20 limits. The package must be designed to confine the high-level radioactive waste for the duration of the license.

(i) Instrumentation and control systems. Instrumentation and control systems for wet spent fuel and reactor-related GTCC waste storage must be provided to monitor systems that are important to safety over anticipated ranges for normal operation and off-normal operation. Those instruments and control systems that must remain operational under accident conditions must be identified in the Safety Analysis Report. Instrumentation systems for dry storage casks must be provided in accordance with cask design requirements to monitor conditions that are important to safety over anticipated ranges for normal conditions and off-normal conditions. Systems that are required under accident conditions must be identified in the Safety Analysis Report.

(j) Control room or control area. A control room or control area, if appropriate for the ISFSI or MRS design, must be designed to permit occupancy and actions to be taken to monitor the ISFSI or MRS safely under normal conditions, and to provide safe control of the ISFSI or MRS under off-normal or accident conditions.

(k) Utility or other services.

(1) Each utility service system must be designed to meet emergency conditions. The design of utility services and distribution systems that are important to safety must include redundant systems to the extent necessary to maintain, with adequate capacity, the ability to perform safety functions assuming a single failure.

(2) Emergency utility services must be designed to permit testing of the functional operability and capacity, including the full operational sequence, of each system for transfer between normal and emergency supply sources; and to permit the operation of associated safety systems.

(3) Provisions must be made so that, in the event of a loss of the primary electric power source or circuit, reliable and timely emergency power will be provided to instruments, utility service systems, the central security alarm station, and operating systems, in amounts sufficient to allow safe storage conditions to be maintained and to permit continued functioning of all systems essential to safe storage.

(4) An ISFSI or MRS which is located on the site of another facility may share common utilities and services with such a facility and be physically connected with the other facility; however, the sharing of utilities and services or the physical connection must not significantly:

(i) Increase the probability or consequences of an accident or malfunction of components, structures, or systems that are important to safety; or

(ii) Reduce the margin of safety as defined in the basis for any technical specifications of either facility.

(l) Retrievability. Storage systems must be designed to allow ready retrieval of spent fuel, high-level radioactive waste, and reactor-related GTCC waste for further processing or disposal.

[53 FR 31658, Aug. 19, 1988, as amended at 64 FR 33184, June 22, 1999; 66 FR 51842, Oct. 11, 2001]