The Department of Energy could have its own interim storage facility to store U.S. spent nuclear fuel within a decade or so, the Office of Nuclear Energy’s newly-minted head of waste disposition said during a webinar this week.
“We will have a federal interim storage facility within the decade, if not fifteen years, with a consent-based siting process,” said Sam Brinton, DOE’s deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste Disposition, during the webinar, broadcast Monday.
Erica Bickford, acting head of DOE’s Office of Integrated Waste Management, concurred with Brinton, but said that such a timeline could be subject to change. “We’re going to be flexible, but we’ve got to start with some kind of plan,” she said.
The 10-15 year schedule includes all steps of the interim storage process, including siting, licensing and building a proposed facility, Bickford said.
It’s one of the first times that senior DOE officials have provided a timetable for the agency’s latest attempt to find a willing host community for a federal interim storage facility.
DOE’s most recent step in that process was a roughly $16 million funding opportunity announcement unveiled in September as part of DOE’s ongoing efforts to site a federal interim storage facility.
The agency planned to fund six to eight awardees over a period of roughly two years, or around 18 to 24 months. No single award would be greater than $2 million or smaller than $1 million, DOE said in its funding opportunity announcement Sep. 20. Applications for the award are due Dec. 19.
Meanwhile, Brinton emphasized Monday that DOE was not yet seeking volunteers for interim storage, but said that the agency’s “concentration” for the funding opportunity was on the continental U.S., and that it would consider locations for more than one such facility.
During an exclusive interview last week, Brinton told RadWaste Monitor that DOE would consider its consent-based siting process a success even if no willing interim storage host comes forward.
DOE’s current interim storage inquiry is one of the Joe Biden administration’s first attempts to site a federal interim storage facility using a consent-based process as prescribed by the 2012 Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.
The U.S. currently has no centralized facility to store the nearly 90,000 tons of spent fuel currently stranded at reactor sites nationwide. Although Congress in 1987 solely designated Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as the country’s permanent nuclear waste repository, the site remains unfinished after the Barack Obama administration in 2019 pulled the project’s funding.
The Donald Trump administration’s effort to resume the licensing process for Yucca collapsed in 2018 and the Biden administration has said it will not fund Yucca Mountain.
