Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette said Wednesday he is ready to work with two key Senate appropriators to establish a pilot program for temporary storage of spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants.
Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) noted he and panel Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) have proposed the pilot program in seven consecutive budget bills.
The upper chamber’s energy and water appropriations legislation for fiscal 2020, crafted by Alexander and Feinstein, would have authorized the Energy Department to establish a pilot program for licensing, building, and operating at least one federal facility for consolidated interim storage of used fuel now kept on-site at nuclear plants around the nation.
That language did not make it into the minibus spending bill covering DOE and other agencies for the budget year ended Sept. 30, 2020, which was signed into law in December.
“If we’re able to get our friends in the House of Representatives to agree with us to include Senator Feinstein’s pilot program in our final bill, could you implement it as it’s currently written?” Alexander asked Brouillette during a hearing on the Energy Department’s $35.4 billion budget request for fiscal 2021.
“Yes, we could,” Brouillette responded.
The Energy Department spending plan includes no funding for licensing a geologic repository for nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain, Nev., after three attempts that were rejected by Congress. Instead, it requests $27.5 million for an Interim Storage and Nuclear Waste Fund Oversight program. Both Alexander and Feinstein expressed dismay at the turn of events.
“The administration proposes to abandon Yucca Mountain and move ahead with some unknown alternative for storage of nuclear waste,” Feinstein said. “Now, the abandonment without a replacement is what concerns me.”
Under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the Energy Department is responsible for disposal of the nation’s stockpile of used fuel and high-level waste from defense nuclear operations. Interim storage has been viewed as a way for the agency to meet its mandate in the absence of a final disposal site.
There is 84,000 metric tons of used fuel at 76 nuclear sites in about 30 states, Feinstein noted. Work on the Energy Department’s 2008 license application for the Yucca Mountain repository before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been frozen since the Obama administration defunded the proceeding a decade ago.
