Fifteen Democratic members of Congress from states with retired or soon-to-close nuclear power plants this week urged leading House appropriators to provide $25 million to help establish interim storage of radioactive waste.
Two private corporate teams are seeking Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses for sites that could hold used fuel commercial power plants until the Department of Energy meets its legal mandate to build a permanent repository for the material. The department is separately also legally obligated to remove Greater-Than-Class C radioactive waste from commercial and government generation sites.
“With this in mind, we respectfully request $25 million to support the development of a [consolidated interim storage] program at DOE, the necessary applications, and assist with site preparation activities and regional transportation efforts of” spent nuclear fuel, the House members said in an April 1 letter to Reps. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) and Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), respectively the chair and ranking member of the House Appropriations energy and water development committee.
For the upcoming 2020 federal fiscal year, DOE has requested $116 million for the licensing the planned repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., and to develop a “robust” interim storage program. However, Congress has rejected similar requests in the last two years.
Within the $25 million total requested in this week’s letter, $10 million would be used to begin “a robust CIS program” at DOE, $10 million to prepare nuclear facilities to begin moving their spent fuel to interim storage, and $5 million for DOE work to resume regional transport compacts and transportation coordination of the waste.
Additional details about the request from Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.) and 14 colleagues were not immediately available.
The signatories represent California, home to the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, due to close in 2025, and four retired facilities; Wisconsin, where one of three plants remains operational; Massachusetts, where the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station is scheduled for retirement by the end of May; Maine, where the Maine Yankee facility was decommissioned by 2005; and New Jersey, where the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station closed in October 2018.
Representatives for Kaptur and Simpson did not respond by deadline to requests for comment on the letter.
The Department of Energy is already more than two decades past its Jan. 31, 1998, deadline to begin accepting spent fuel from commercial nuclear power reactors for disposal. Of its $116 million request for fiscal 2020, just over $6.5 would be directed to preparation of interim storage resources, according to DOE’s latest budget plan.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is expected by mid-2020 to rule on two applications for 40-year licenses for interim storage: Holtec International’s facility in southeastern New Mexico, with a maximum capacity of 173,000 metric tons of used fuel; and an Orano-Waste Control Specialists site able to hold as much as 40,000 metric tons.
Nuclear power plants around the United States currently hold about 80,000 metric tons of spent fuel on-site, a stockpile that grows by roughly 2,000 metric tons annually. The federal government has already paid more than $8 billion to nuclear utilities for its liability in failing to take the waste off their hands. The total liability could be over $30 billion, the House lawmakers said in the letter.
“These funds are paid out of a permanent appropriations account known as the Judgment Fund and they add to the federal deficit without benefit of budget or appropriations considerations,” they wrote.
Greater-Than-Class C waste, along with the similar GTCC-like waste, are different streams of material that are ultimately expected to total 12,000 cubic meters in the U.S.
Greater-Than-Class C waste refers to any form of low-level waste with radionuclide concentrations greater than those for Class C material as classified by federal regulations. That covers sealed sources, scrap metal, and wastes from government and commercial nuclear operations such as cleanup of the West Valley Site in New York state and decommissioning of power plants. A 1985 law made DOE responsible for disposal of that material.
The Energy Department is also responsible for GTCC-like waste, low-level and non-defense transuranic wastes produced or owned by the agency. This material is stored at the Idaho National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Oak Ridge Reservation, among other locations.
Currently, there is no disposal location for either waste type.
The Energy Department indicated in October it aims to send the material to Waste Control Specialists’ complex for final disposal. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission anticipates this spring it will issue the draft regulatory basis for a potential rulemaking allowing near-surface or other disposal methods that do not involve deep geologic repositories.
