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 Bushman, 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.”
Bushman, 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.”
Bushman 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 reportedly staffed his 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.
The consent-based plan to date has focused on disposal of tens of thousands of tons of commercial waste from nuclear reactors around the country.