Interim Storage & Waste Disposal

Lawmakers are piling on to co-sponsor a House bill that would smooth the way to open Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent nuclear waste repository. This week alone, 32 additional representatives associated themselves with Rep. John Shimkus’ (R-Ill.) Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017 (H.R.3053): a 45-page bill officially introduced in the […]

The federal government is likely to rack up tens of billions of dollars in liability over the Department of Energy’s decades-long failure to meet its legal mandate to build a permanent home for spent fuel from U.S. commercial power reactors, lawmakers and panelists said Tuesday during a congressional hearing on U.S. nuclear waste management. More […]

Thomas Gardiner Degrading safety equipment in the spent nuclear fuel pool at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts forced plant owner and operator Entergy to devise a plan to more than double its current number of used fuel assemblies in dry cask storage. The current storage situation, in which close to 3,000 spent fuel […]

Canada’s Port Hope Project is scheduled by the end of November to complete the first of four storage cells of an above-ground engineered mound for storage of radioactive waste, with transport and storage due to start early in 2018. The Port Hope Project, one part of a broader radioactive waste cleanup program covering two municipalities […]

Lawmakers are piling on to co-sponsor a House bill that would smooth the way to open Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent nuclear waste repository. This week alone, 32 additional representatives associated themselves with Rep. John Shimkus’ (R-Ill.) Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017 (H.R.3053): a 45-page bill officially introduced in the […]

So far this week, 16 more lawmakers have signed on to co-sponsor a bill that would smooth the way to open Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent nuclear waste repository. That makes a total of 78 for Rep. John Shimkus’ (R-Ill.) Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017 (H.R.3053): a 45-page bill […]

The federal government is likely to rack up tens of billions of dollars in liability over the Department of Energy’s decades-long failure to meet its legal mandate to build a permanent home for spent fuel from U.S. commercial power reactors, lawmakers and panelists said Tuesday during a congressional hearing on U.S. nuclear waste management. More […]

The House Oversight interior, energy, and environment subcommittee will meet on Tuesday for a hearing to assess the management and storage of U.S. nuclear waste. The intention of the hearing is to consider management of what is now more than 76,000 metric tons of nuclear waste that remains in storage at nuclear plants across the nation […]

Canada’s Port Hope Project will by the end of November complete the first of four storage cells of an above-ground engineered mound for storage of radioactive waste, with transport and storage due to start early in 2018. The Port Hope Project, one part of a broader radioactive waste cleanup program in Ontario, will ultimately place […]

Entities that ship radiological waste to the large disposal site operated by Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas, will see their state fees reduced through mid-2019. The fee reductions, which went into effect this summer, were approved earlier this year by the Texas Legislature in an effort to improve business prospects for the financially […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has requested additional information from the Department of Energy regarding its request for a two decade-year extension to the license for storage of waste from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant at the Idaho National Laboratory. The Energy Department currently has NRC authorization to hold waste from the Pennsylvania plant’s […]

Officials from the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce are headed to Washington, D.C., next week to visit with Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.): architect of a bill that would help clear the way for the federal government to turn Yucca Mountain in Nevada into a permanent storage facility for nuclear waste. The Las Vegas Chamber — like […]

Thomas Gardiner An amendment to a U.S. House spending bill passed last week added another layer of open opposition to plans for an underground nuclear waste repository across the border near Lake Huron in Ontario, Canada. The House on Sept. 14 approved government-wide appropriations legislation for fiscal 2018. Included in that bill was an amendment […]

Officials from the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce are headed to Washington, D.C., next week to visit with Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.): architect of a bill that would help clear the way for the federal government to turn Yucca Mountain in Nevada into a permanent storage facility for nuclear waste. The Las Vegas Chamber — like […]

Changes to the legal and regulatory framework for management of Energy Department nuclear waste could save $40 billion in costs for cleanup of the DOE nuclear complex and hasten the removal of that waste from local communities, the Energy Communities Alliance (ECA) said in a new report. “ECA understands this is a large change from […]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has requested additional information from the Department of Energy regarding its request for a two decade-year extension to the license for storage of waste from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant at the Idaho National Laboratory. The Energy Department currently has NRC authorization to hold waste from the Pennsylvania plant’s […]

The primary obstacle to opening Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a nuclear waste-disposal site could be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the House’s top Energy Department appropriator said Thursday. “[I]n the Senate they have a two-vote Republican majority,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) said during the Energy Department-sponsored National Cleanup Workshop in Alexandria, Va. “One of those […]

When ENERCON Federal Services last year became one of four teams bidding to dig a 16,000-foot deep borehole as a test for a potential means of radioactive waste disposal, Outreach Manager Francis “Chip” Cameron thought of it as a mere research effort. “We made the mistake of walking into this, thinking it was going to […]

Holtec International is committed to its plan to build and operate an interim storage facility for used nuclear fuel in New Mexico, no matter what route Congress eventually selects for managing the nation’s nuclear waste, according to the chairman of the organization partnering on the project. “If there is not a bill passed, Holtec and […]

When ENERCON Federal Services last year became one of four teams bidding to dig a 16,000-foot deep borehole as a test for a potential means of radioactive waste disposal, Outreach Manager Francis “Chip” Cameron thought of it as a mere research effort. “We made the mistake of walking into this, thinking it was going to […]

Nevada on Tuesday extended a contract with a Texas-based law firm to continue fighting the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository for another six months at a cost of roughly $1 million. Extending the contract of Egan, Fitzpatrick, Malsch & Lawrence, which also has an office in Washington, D.C., was one of many business items considered […]

The primary obstacle to opening Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a nuclear waste-disposal site could be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the House’s top Energy Department appropriator said Thursday. “[I]n the Senate they have a two-vote Republican majority,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) said during the Energy Department-sponsored National Cleanup Workshop in Alexandria, Va. “One of […]

Nevada on Tuesday extended a contract with a Texas-based law firm to continue fighting the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository for another six months at a cost of roughly $1 million. Extending the contract of Egan, Fitzpatrick, Malsch & Lawrence, which also has an office in Washington, D.C., was one of many business items considered […]

Nuclear business development consultant Jan Carlin has been named managing director of Waste Management Symposia. In a press release Tuesday, the nonprofit organization touted Carlin’s “extensive technical and business-development experience across both the DOE Complex and the commercial nuclear industry.” Carlin is director of business development for Wälischmiller Engineering GmbH, a Markdorf, Germany-based producer of remote-control technology […]

Holtec International is committed to its plan to build and operate an interim storage facility for used nuclear fuel in New Mexico, no matter what route Congress eventually selects for managing the nation’s nuclear waste, according to the chairman of the organization partnering on the project. “If there is not a bill passed, Holtec and […]

Smartphone technology revolutionized the way people make dinner reservations and get their news, but it hasn’t done much to enhance public discourse on nuclear waste management, according to Pajarito Scientific Corp. President and CEO George Dials. “I’ve never seen a time when there was such an impasse in merely communicating,” Dials, an industry veteran who […]

When ENERCON Federal Services last year became one of four teams bidding to dig a 16,000-foot deep borehole as a test for a potential means of radioactive waste disposal, Outreach Manager Francis “Chip” Cameron thought of it as a mere research project. “We made the mistake of walking into this, thinking it was going to […]

SUMMERLIN, Nev. — Disposal of spent fuel is crucial to the domestic nuclear industry and will be among the Trump administration’s priorities in this sector, acting Assistant Energy Secretary for Nuclear Energy Edward McGinnis said Tuesday. “The back end is a key pillar of our nuclear sector,” McGinnis said in the opening plenary to the […]

SUMMERLIN, Nev. — The state of Nevada plans to submit 30 to 50 new contentions with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission against building a permanent nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, the state’s point man on the project said Wednesday. Should the NRC ultimately approve a license for construction of the underground storage site, state lawsuits […]

The drive to restart the Energy Department’s application to license Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent nuclear-waste repository has stalled at least for another three months under a stopgap budget bill expected to become law soon. Both chambers of Congress by Friday had approved a continuing resolution that funds the federal government for […]