A highly critical congressional report this week could open the door for Energy Secretary-designate Rick Perry to reverse the Obama administration’s finding that the Energy Department should build a deep-underground disposal site specifically for nuclear waste created by Cold War weapons programs.
“DOE did not show that benefits outweighed costs in recommending to the President that the nation should depart from its longstanding nuclear waste strategy” of building a single deep-underground nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) stated in a report published Tuesday.
In a draft plan released Dec. 16, then-President Barack Obama’s DOE estimated it would cost roughly $3 billion over 11 years to locate a suitable site for a so-called Defense Waste Repository that would accept only nuclear waste from defense programs. This week, GAO said the agency’s price tag for selecting a site might be off by tens of billions of dollars — noting that the DOE plan would incur separate expenses for site selection, site characterization, and other operations for two sites rather than one. Site characterization for Yucca alone cost $8.5 billion, according to the report.
Congressional auditors recommended DOE redo the estimate and “revise — if needed — the report’s conclusion that a strong basis exists to find that a defense HLW [high level waste] repository is required.”
In an official reply appended to the office’s report, DOE largely disagreed with the GAO findings: “The DOE believes pursuit of a defense repository bears merit, particularly in advancing the cleanup of our Cold War Sites, but the DOE has not irrevocably committed to building a defense repository.” The reply appeared below a letter signed by acting Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Raymond Furstenau, a career civil servant. A DOE spokesperson did not reply to requests for comment by deadline for Weapons Complex Monitor.
The Department of Energy has had a hard time getting traction for the Obama-era plan to build separate disposal facilities for commercial spent nuclear fuel and high-level defense waste, including more than 80 million gallons of liquid waste at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., and the Savannah River Site site near Aiken, S.C. The agency plans to solidify that waste into glass on site over the next several decades, then dispose of the easier-to-handle cylinders deep underground.
Republicans on Capitol Hill, particularly in the House of Representatives, have never been swayed by DOE’s argument that a Defense Waste Repository could save money, compared with opening Yucca Mountain. President Donald Trump staffed his transition team with former DOE officials who also support a Yucca restart.
The Obama administration wanted to start searching for a Defense Waste Repository site this year as part of its consent-based siting program for nuclear waste. The administration requested $15 million for the effort in fiscal 2017, but Congress prohibited spending any money on the Defense Waste Repository as part of the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act that President Barack Obama signed before he left office.
Meanwhile, although the nuclear power industry is ostensibly neutral on the Defense Waste Repository, its Washington-based trade group, the Nuclear Energy Institute, supports Yucca Mountain. The two repositories are de facto competitors for federal funding that is already tight and which could get tighter with a Republican-controlled government.
“DOE should finish the licensing process before they begin to consider looking for a second repository,” Ellen Ginsberg, the Nuclear Energy Institute’s vice president and general counsel, wrote in a Thursday email. “In addition, if a defense only repository is pursued, nuclear waste fund money should not be used, as nuclear energy producers and ratepayers contributed to that fund for disposal of commercial used fuel.”
Last month, then-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz suggested it would be cheaper to build a Defense Waste Repository in the immediate future rather than gamble on a Yucca restart that might take a long time realize.
“[I]f it appears that a defense waste repository could be realized well ahead of the spent fuel repository, then that will probably be a very attractive option,” Moniz told reporters a week before President Trump’s first term began. “Time is worth a lot.”
DOE’s long-telegraphed plan for a Defense Waste Repository followed a 2015 decision by Obama that defense and civilian nuclear waste should be placed in separate underground repositories. That undid a decades-old finding by the Ronald Reagan administration.
Yucca Mountain remains the only legally authorized deep-underground repository for high-level defense waste or spent fuel from nuclear power plants. The Obama administration effectively canceled Yucca in 2010 when it halted the licensing process for the repository, which is handled by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.