A local advisory board this week voiced its opposition to using the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina for interim storage of nuclear waste, but could not come to agreement on a request for DOE to prohibit shipments to the facility of highly enriched uranium from Germany.
The Energy Department should “not consider SRS as a reasonable consolidated interim storage location for EM spent nuclear fuel and high level radioactive waste pending establishment of a permanent geologic repository,” the SRS Citizens Advisory Board (CAB) said in a recommendation approved in a 16-6-1 vote at its bimonthly meeting Tuesday.
Congress and DOE have for years considered options for consolidating nuclear waste now housed at facilities across the country until a final storage site can be built. A private group in South Carolina in 2016 announced plans to apply for a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license for interim storage. but by this year had abandoned that approach. The industry’s focus has been on planned private facilities in Texas and New Mexico, though DOE has not ruled out interest in other possible proposals.
The Trump administration is intent on securing $150 million in DOE and NRC funding for fiscal 2018 to revive the licensing process for the planned Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada, which its predecessor had abandoned. The House of Representatives has effectively met the administration’s request in its energy appropriations bill, while Senate appropriators included no money for Yucca Mountain.
The CAB recommendation also asks DOE to “stabilize and remove” the roughly 2,700 bundles of foreign and domestic spent fuel currently stored at SRS as quickly as possible. This is critical to SRS not becoming a permanent waste disposal facility for DOE’s spent fuel stockpiles, according to the board. Currently, SRS is not being considered for such storage, but the CAB has previously stated it wants to make its position clear.
Meanwhile, the CAB tabled a recommendation that asks the Energy Department to discontinue efforts to bring the German HEU to the site near Aiken, S.C.