Moniz Confident Interim Storage Funding Will Make Final Budget

Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz feels confident that funding for a pilot interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel will make it into the Fiscal Year 2016 Budget, he said yesterday during remarks at the 2015 Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference. The Department of Energy has moved away from the Yucca Mountain project, deeming the site ‘unworkable.’ In its place, DOE embraced a strategy of consolidated interim storage under a consent-based approach, which Moniz feels will finally make it through the budget process. “What we are doing, are doing now and have in our Fiscal Year 16 budget is fundamentally to move forward the agenda that was set out initially by the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future and the administration’s statement of policy in January 2013,” Moniz said. “It has a number of components. A very important one is moving, we would like to say promptly, toward consolidated storage, dry cask storage, of fuel. Last year such an initiative did pass the Senate. I believe we will be revisiting that next year, and we will get it across the finish line.” The Senate included almost $90 million in funding for a pilot storage facility for the Fiscal Year 2015 budget, but the project did not make into the enacted 2015 budget.