Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chair Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) pushed Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz yesterday on why the Department of Energy did not include spent nuclear fuel policy in its Quadrennial Energy Review. Murkowski has supported efforts in the Senate for nuclear waste reform in the past, going so far as to co-sponsor the Senate bill that would introduce interim storage as part of the nation’s disposal stagey. “There was very little in the QER about nuclear energy and really nothing on the backend of the fuel cycle,” Murkowski said during a Senate hearing yesterday. Murkowski plans to hold a Senate Energy hearing on the nuclear waste legislation in the next month and a half.
Moniz, meanwhile, maintained that the QER was meant for energy infrastructure, not nuclear energy policy. “Again, the QER was on infrastructure and moving energy around, opposed to nuclear power. I think you are correct,” Moniz said. “We could have put something in there in terms of transportation of spent nuclear fuel. We do have in our budget request for FY16 about $6.9 million specifically to address the transportation questions of spent fuel including the kinds of rail casks you would need, etc. So, that’s in there, but otherwise we did not address that in the QER. But I am happy to keep talking about that, including the storage options, and the transportation options, and developing consent-based processes, and looking at the defense-waste pathways that we can now pursue.”