dewey - burdock permitting overview

Here's an insight to the delays in attaining NRC permitting within Powertechs soon to be renamed pending approval "Azarga Uranium" Dewey-Burdock Uranium Project.

Seems the permitting guidance from the NRC has been a major issue, BUT it does seem that the permitting process has been simplified with a new Question & Answer format of processing.


IMO: This can only assist an easier permitting road for Black Range Minerals, in regards to attaining all relevant NRC permits over the coming 12-18 Months.

In the mean time all is focused on the " Ablation Recovery Process " and to a lesser extent attaining a quick transfer of Uranium Ones U.S. Owned Assets.



IMO: This is a must read for Current & prospective BLR Holders !


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New Submission May Be Path Out of Impasse for Powertech
By Nancy E. Roth, Managing Editor

This has been one tough year for Powertech (TSX:PWE). Ever
since it received a Request for Additional Information (RAI)
from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in May 2010 on the
company’s application for a license to develop an in-situ recovery
mine on its Dewey-Burdock uranium property in South Dakota,
it has been trying to produce a set of responses that the agency
would accept.

Conversations with Powertech and agency officials along with
an examination of documents on NRC’s website detailing
the company’s interactions with regulators make it clear that
Powertech has had difficulty understanding what agency staff
wanted of them at many points in the application process. This
held true also in the company’s response to the RAI, which
contained hundreds of detailed queries and requests for data
about the proposed facility.

Consequently Powertech submitted RAI responses that NRC
staff repeatedly found insufficient. The first response went in on
Dec. 13, 2010. NRC staff started communicating their concerns
in February, and followed up with a detailed email on March
7 from the NRC project manager, Ronald Burrows, laying out
more than 100 deficiencies in the RAI responses. It also gave the
company notice that NRC staff had stopped evaluating the health
and safety section of the application.

Powertech and NRC staff then held a public meeting at NRC
headquarters for two full days, April 7-8, to discuss what the
staff needed to continue the evaluation, plus give Powertech a
chance to answer the major questions NRC had included in the
RAI package.

“We were very clear as to what was necessary to get in to us,”
William Von Till, chief of NRC’s Uranium Recovery Licensing
Branch, told FCW this week. “We gave them two days of
discussion with the goal of getting them back on track.”
Von Till noted that at the meeting Powertech had “pulled in
additional consultants” to help them complete the RAI response,
which Von Till thought was a positive development. “The meeting
was very productive,” he told FCW.

In an April 22 letter Powertech Vice President Richard Blubaugh
told Burrows that the meeting had been “both instructional and
clarifying” and that Powertech planned to submit “the complete
and revised responses” to the remaining RAI questions on or
about June 29.


Press Distorts, Investors Punished

On May 6, NRC, following normal procedure, sent the company
a formal letter identifying the four “critical issues” discussed at
the meeting that required more detailed information. The letter
also repeated the notice that the staff had put aside the health
and safety evaluation until the company provided the needed
information. But the letter made it clear that NRC would
continue reviewing the environmental section of the application
as well as the Section 106 tribal consultations on the proposed
in-situ facility (FCW #429, June 16).

Agency staff told FCW last month that they could have decided
to stop all work on the application, sending Powertech’s project
to the back of the license-application queue. Instead, FCW was
told, the staff had taken the most lenient corrective path because
“we are confident that Powertech can deliver the information we
need.”

But what the popular press relayed to the public was very nearly
the opposite.

“Powertech operations have been suspended,” said the headline
in the Coloradoan on May 10, although Powertech was not
operating anything. NRC was “suspending the permitting process
because Powertech was unable to answer public health and safety
questions about the Dewey-Burdock mine” [FCW emphasis].
By implying that Powertech could not answer the questions, the
reporter subtly introduced the idea that the project itself had
serious health and safety issues that Powertech might not want
to reveal.

The Rapid City Journal account of May 14 offered a more
accurate headline but did not compare inaccurate assertions by
project opponents with the text of the letter. Nor did the reporter
apparently ask NRC staff about their intent.

Powertech’s share price fell from $0.27 on May 3 to $0.17 on May
16, a 37% drop. It subsequently recovered to $0.21, a net loss of
33%. Whether investors were reacting to the NRC letter or the
flurry of negative coverage is hard to say. Vol. 10 • No. 431 • June 30, 2011 http://fuelcycleweek.com 4
Inconsistent Instruction?

Dick Clement, company president and CEO, told FCW last
month that he was confident that the new submission, which
went in on Wednesday, would restart the full license application
process, and affirmed that Powertech was not quitting.
“Dewey-Burdock is the best uranium project in the U.S.,” he
said.

Asked about the company’s difficulty in responding to the RAI,
Clement said the initial effort was made needlessly laborious, not
because of the number or nature of the questions, but because
NRC staff had instructed the company to format its response
according to NUREG 1569 guidance. This was cumbersome and
time-consuming for the staff, he said. After they submitted the
document, said Clement, they heard from other NRC officials
that they should have used a simpler, question-and-answer
format.

Asked for evidence that it had received varying instructions,
Clement sent FCW the May 28, 2010, RAI document, which
includes a request to “please submit all appropriate page changes
that incorporate the response” with the RAI response. Blubaugh
followed up with a telephone call to the project manager asking
if the staff wanted replacement pages (in compliance with the
guidance) and was told yes, according to Clement.

A senior NRC official insisted that the staff had passed along no
such formatting instruction, and that Powertech should have
checked other examples of RAI submissions, had they been
uncertain. In fact, said the official, the format of Powertech’s
document was “problematic” for the reviewers.

In February Powertech resubmitted the response in a question and-answer format.
FCW understands from another license applicant that a similar
miscommunication may have happened before.

In that case the applicant had assembled its application according
to the NUREG-1569 guidance, with the approval of its NRC
project manager, FCW was told.

The 255-page guidance document itself reveals in an introductory
section that although the style and format it sets out “may be
considered complex or redundant” it was “consistent with NRC
practice for standard review plan style and format” and would
“preserve consistency with other NRC standard review plans.”
“We spent quite a lot of money putting it together,” the applicant
told FCW. “Then [the application] comes back six months later
and we’re told it’s unacceptable. They didn’t like our format.”



Cheers from G64 :)
Outcome of the above procedures ? Is A lesson learned !


Black Range Minerals + Azarga/Blumont + Powertech + Anatolia = IMO: A Potential Major US/World Uranium Producer.

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