Existing Regulations
B1.3: Routine maintenance
Routine maintenance activities and custodial services for buildings, structures, rights-of-way, infrastructures (including, but not limited to, pathways, roads, and railroads), vehicles and equipment, and localized vegetation and pest control, during which operations may be suspended and resumed, provided that the activities would be conducted in a manner in accordance with applicable requirements. Custodial services are activities to preserve facility appearance, working conditions, and sanitation (such as cleaning, window washing, lawn mowing, trash collection, painting, and snow removal). Routine maintenance activities, corrective (that is, repair), preventive, and predictive, are required to maintain and preserve buildings, structures, infrastructures, and equipment in a condition suitable for a facility to be used for its designated purpose. Such maintenance may occur as a result of severe weather (such as hurricanes, floods, and tornados), wildfires, and other such events. Routine maintenance may result in replacement to the extent that replacement is in-kind and is not a substantial upgrade or improvement. In-kind replacement includes installation of new components to replace outmoded components, provided that the replacement does not result in a significant change in the expected useful life, design capacity, or function of the facility. Routine maintenance does not include replacement of a major component that significantly extends the originally intended useful life of a facility (for example, it does not include the replacement of a reactor vessel near the end of its useful life). Routine maintenance activities include, but are not limited to: (a) Repair or replacement of facility equipment, such as lathes, mills, pumps, and presses; (b) Door and window repair or replacement; (c) Wall, ceiling, or floor repair or replacement; (d) Reroofing; (e) Plumbing, electrical utility, lighting, and telephone service repair or replacement; (f) Routine replacement of high-efficiency particulate air filters; (g) Inspection and/or treatment of currently installed utility poles; (h) Repair of road embankments; (i) Repair or replacement of fire protection sprinkler systems; (j) Road and parking area resurfacing, including construction of temporary access to facilitate resurfacing, and scraping and grading of unpaved surfaces; (k) Erosion control and soil stabilization measures (such as reseeding, gabions, grading, and revegetation); (l) Surveillance and maintenance of surplus facilities in accordance with DOE Order 435.1, “Radioactive Waste Management,” or its successor; (m) Repair and maintenance of transmission facilities, such as replacement of conductors of the same nominal voltage, poles, circuit breakers, transformers, capacitors, crossarms, insulators, and downed powerlines, in accordance, where appropriate, with 40 CFR part 761 (Polychlorinated Biphenyls Manufacturing, Processing, Distribution in Commerce, and Use Prohibitions) or its successor; (n) Routine testing and calibration of facility components, subsystems, or portable equipment (such as control valves, in-core monitoring devices, transformers, capacitors, monitoring wells, lysimeters, weather stations, and flumes); (o) Routine decontamination of the surfaces of equipment, rooms, hot cells, or other interior surfaces of buildings (by such activities as wiping with rags, using strippable latex, and minor vacuuming), and removal of contaminated intact equipment and other material (not including spent nuclear fuel or special nuclear material in nuclear reactors); and (p) Removal of debris.
Previous Regulations
Categorical Exclusion Determinations dated before November 14th, 2011 were issued under previous DOE NEPA regulations. See the Notice of Final Rulemaking (76 FR 63763, 10/13/2011) for information changes to this categorical exclusion.