A group of bipartisan Senators re-introduced legislation yesterday that would overhaul the nation’s nuclear waste policy. Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) put forth the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2015, which heavily echoes the bill the group introduced in 2013, but that bill never made it to mark-up. The bill contains language that would create a new waste management organization in the federal government to take over spent nuclear fuel disposal from the Department of Energy; allow the construction of a consent-based pilot interim storage facility; provide DOE the ability to build additional consolidated facilities within 10 years, but after 10 years, a site for a permanent repository must be selected; and establish a new working capital fund in the U.S. Treasury, where fees collected from utilities would be deposited and where the new agency would not need appropriations approval to use.
The bill should see significant movement with both leadership from the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee on board. “If we want to continue to have low-cost, clean power from nuclear reactors, which today produce about 60 percent of our country’s emission-free electricity, then we have to have a place to put the used nuclear fuel,” Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Alexander said in a statement. “That means we need to end the stalemate over what to do with our country’s nuclear waste by finding a way to create both temporary and permanent storage sites that would complement other solutions. This legislation, which is consistent with the president’s Blue Ribbon Commission, would do that by allowing state and local governments to compete for these facilities and the good-paying jobs that come with them.”
