The Energy Department will unveil a draft plan for a new deep-geologic repository for defense nuclear waste in the coming days, an agency official said Tuesday during a presentation to a citizens group in South Carolina.
“I’m talking about a deep geological repository,” DOE’s Nancy Buschman, senior adviser for defense waste disposal, told members of the Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board in a webcast meeting late Tuesday. The hypothetical repository would accept “all, or a portion, of the high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel that results from atomic defense nuclear activities,” she said.
Selecting a site for the repository and vetting that location would cost roughly $3 billion and take about 11 years, Buschman said. That is separate from the cost of actually building the repository: an undertaking for which Buschman’s team had not yet produced a cost or schedule estimate.
Buschman, on loan to DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy from the Office of Environmental Management to help with the Obama administration’s consent-based siting program for nuclear waste, said a draft plan for the defense-only repository “will hopefully be released in the next couple of days.”
The department had not released the complete draft plan, as of deadline for Weapons Complex Monitor.
Buschman did describe one feature of DOE’s plan: the agency wants to pick from between two repository sites identified by localities that volunteer to host the defense waste for long-term storage.
Buschman also cautioned that DOE’s plan for the defense-only facility might or might not be among the priorities of the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump. Trump has staffed his DOE transition team with nuclear experts who favor reviving the Yucca Mountain disposal site in Nevada, which the Obama administration canceled in 2010. That facility was designed for both defense and commercial waste. DOE in 2015 received formal authorization to move forward with a plan to establish a repository specifically for defense-only high-level radioactive waste.
Much of the Obama administration’s consent-based plan to date has focused on disposal of tens of thousands of tons of commercial waste from nuclear reactors around the country.
