ARLINGTON, VA. — Just because Republicans took control of the House does not mean that Congress has any more desire to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain than it had before the midterms, a senior Department of Energy official said here this week.
Asked Tuesday after a speech at the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management’s annual Spent Fuel Management Seminar how DOE would engage with a fresh attempt at restarting the mothballed Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada, acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition Kim Petry sidestepped the question.
“There doesn’t seem to be an appetite for it in Congress on either side of the aisle,” Petry said, pointing to the Donald Trump administration’s ill-fated attempts to restart the project. That effort “didn’t really go anywhere,” she said.
The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act authorized the Nye County, Nev., Yucca Mountain site as the nation’s only permanent repository for nuclear waste. Opposition from stakeholders and political pressure from the Nevada congressional delegation delayed the project until 2010, when the Barack Obama administration pulled its funding and put it on ice indefinitely.
Instead of focusing on Yucca Mountain as a spent fuel disposal solution, DOE’s goal is to work with Congress and the White House to “figure out a good path forward for a repository using a consent based siting process” that will survive changes in administration, Petry said.
“What we tried didn’t really work with Yucca Mountain,” Petry said. “We’re trying to learn from our mistakes so we don’t make the same ones.”
DOE is in the early stages of its most recent effort to find a willing host for a federally-run interim storage facility for the nation’s spent fuel inventory.
The agency is until Jan. 31 accepting bids on roughly $26 million of funding aimed at bringing interested communities and stakeholders together to hash out a process for siting such a facility — a sum that got a roughly $10 million increase as part of Congress’s December omnibus spending bill.
