Congress informally discouraged storage of radioactive waste near the Great Lakes in an annual defense policy bill awaiting final votes this week.
“We discourage the Government of the United States and the Government of Canada from developing storage facilities for permanent storage of spent nuclear fuel, low-level or high-level nuclear waste, or military-grade nuclear material within the Great Lakes Basin,” Congress wrote in a report appended to the compromise version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2025.
The compromise NDAA, negotiated behind closed doors by House and Senate members to reconcile competing proposals passed over the summer, was scheduled for its first procedural votes on Monday afternoon.
That discouragement, part of a detailed, but not legally binding, report appended to this year’s NDAA, was a step down from what the House of Representatives had proposed: a sense of Congress that neither the U.S. nor Canada should make a high-level waste repository near the Great Lakes.
Although a sense of Congress resolution is not legally binding either, such a resolution formalizes a joint and indefinite opinion of both legislative chambers.
Congress has opposed radwaste storage near the Great Lakes before. The ADVANCE Act, passed this summer, requires the Department of Energy to report on any efforts to build repositories near the large freshwater bodies on the U.S.-Canadian border.
Last week, Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization selected the Township of Ignace, 440 miles north by road from Duluth, Minn., and about 135 miles in a straight line from the northern shores of Lake Superior, as a site for a deep geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel.
