An Obama-era Energy Department plan to build a dedicated repository for nuclear waste generated by defense programs is full of faulty cost estimates and does not make a compelling case for scrapping The Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada that would store both defense and commercial waste, the investigative arm of Congress said Tuesday.
“DOE did not show that benefits outweighed costs in recommending to the President that the nation should depart from its longstanding nuclear waste strategy,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in its report on the Obama administration’s proposed Defense Waste Repository.
Although this is the first published GAO report to address DOE’s nuclear complex since President Donald Trump was sworn in on Jan. 20, congressional investigators began work on the document well before Inauguration Day.
Late last year, in the final month of then-President Barack Obama’s second term, DOE released a draft plan for a Defense Waste Repository that reiterated the administration’s position that it would be cheaper in the long run to create a deep-geologic burial ground specifically for nuclear waste created by weapons programs and the nuclear Navy.
DOE said the Defense Waste Repository would cost roughly $3 billion over 11 years. However, that covers only the expense of finding one site for the proposed waste center and thoroughly characterizing, or vetting, that area’s suitability for long-term storage, according to the agency’s draft plan for the facility.
However, the GAO said this estimate was “not reliable,” and “excluded major costs that will likely add tens of billions of dollars” to DOE’s published estimate. In particular, the DOE plan did not include some costs that would be incurred in developing each of the two repositories, including site selection and characterization, the GAO said. That omission means “decision-makers are unable to directly compare DOE’s cost estimates for separate repositories with its cost estimates for a single, commingled repository” such as Yucca Mountain, according to the report.
“DOE agreed on the need for a more thorough assessment, but disagreed on the need to reassess site selection activities, citing benefits of its approach,” the report says.
The Obama administration effectively canceled the deep-underground Yucca Mountain repository in 2010, over the objection of congressional Republicans who to this day want the site to open for business. Some members of Trump’s transition team also favor restarting licensing proceedings for Yucca.