The Energy Communities Alliance got some good news last month when the omnibus budget for fiscal 2018 kept in place existing Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) agreements, ECA Director of Nuclear Energy Programs Kara Colton said Monday.
The budget does call for a report on how the Energy Department formulates PILT payments to communities near its facilities, to compensate for the loss of property taxes not paid by federal lands. House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee Chairman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) had sought such a report to calculate how DOE will divvy up any PILT money. The lawmaker had previously expressed interest in a full overhaul of the PILT program.
The 2018 omnibus bill will fully fund the PILT program at an estimated $530 million, a $65 million increase over 2017 funding levels.
Many local governments adjoining DOE cleanup sites rely upon these payments from the Energy Department to help fund local schools, ECA Executive Director Seth Kirshenberg said in opening remarks during the organization’s annual conference Thursday in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, these payments are sometimes late due to continuing resolutions on the federal budget, he added.
PILT and the manner in which the Energy Department defines high-level waste were top topics of conversation at the ECA gathering.
Waste definition is an ongoing concern for local communities, said Rick McLeod, president and CEO of the Savannah River Site Community Reuse Organization. During his presentation, McLeod said DOE missed a February deadline to issue a report on waste characterization.
Colton hopes the report might be issued soon now that Anne Marie White has been sworn in as assistant secretary of energy for environmental management. In a September report, ECA urged the Energy Department to consider defining waste more by its radiological composition and less by its source of origin.
Many of the containers of waste now stored at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which are classified as high-level, might well be determined to be transuranic waste if radiological components were the chief factor, McLeod said. Because there is no national repository for high-level waste, this waste has no permanent path to disposal. Meanwhile, transuranic waste can be shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
