A lawmaker from New York state has introduced legislation aimed at easing the way for placing spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste into interim storage until a permanent repository is built.
The “Removing Nuclear Waste from our Communities Act of 2017” is one of three bills filed in November by Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) that are intended to provide relief to residents near the Indian Point Energy Center in Westchester County as it approaches closure.
The other measures address security and emergency preparedness standards at nuclear power plants and partial redistribution of Energy Department safety enforcement fines to local communities that lose tax revenue when these facilities close.
“The congresswoman wanted to leverage the federal government to the extent possible to ease the burden of the [Indian Point] transition,” Lowey spokesman Mike Burns said Thursday.
H.R. 4442 would amend the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act to authorize the U.S. energy secretary to establish contracts for storage of high-level waste and spent fuel with any licensee for a consolidated interim storage facility. That legislative authorization is one of the steps needed to take interim storage from a conceptual idea to reality.
The Energy Department has looked to interim storage as a means of meeting its obligation under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to begin removing spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power sites while it tries to determine the way forward for permanent disposal of the waste.
Under the bill, the energy secretary would also be able to issue new contracts or update existing deals with any generator or title-holder of high-level radioactive waste or spent fuel “for the acceptance of title and subsequent storage of such waste or fuel at an interim consolidated storage facility.” Priority would go to storage of waste from facilities in which the nuclear reactor is no longer operating and which are within a 50-mile radius of over 15 million people.
That fits Indian Point, the Entergy facility that sits in the Hudson Valley north of New York City and is scheduled to shut down its two reactors in 2020 and 2021. The language in the bill is not specific to Indian Point, and would apply to other nuclear power plants in densely populated areas, Burns said.
“We just think, from a safety point of view, it just makes sense to prioritize removal” of the waste, Burns said. “It’s not far from New York City.”
The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station near San Diego, which closed permanently in 2013, would also meet the requirements set by the bill, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman said Thursday.
Addressing another potential sticking point to interim storage, the Lowey legislation says the energy secretary will have assumed title of high-level radioactive waste or spent fuel upon delivery or acceptance of the material.
Nuclear utilities would not be required to settle claims over waste disposal ahead of entering into contracts covered by the measure. The Department of Energy has already paid out billions of dollars to nuclear utilities, with tens of billions more in payments anticipated, for failing to meet its mandate under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to begin accepting spent fuel and high-level waste for disposal by Jan. 31, 1998.
The legislation would make a number of additional amendments to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, including adding “interim consolidated storage facility” to the law’s references to “monitored retrievable storage facility.” It makes clear that the federal Nuclear Waste Fund could be used to pay for development, construction, operations, and other costs related to a consolidated interim storage facility – but no more than the cumulative annual interest from the fund in each federal budget year, starting in fiscal 2020.
There are presently two license applications before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for construction of interim storage sites for nuclear waste: Holtec International’s planned facility in southeastern New Mexico for up to 120,000 metric tons of material; and Waste Control Specialists’ proposed 40,000-metric-ton-capacity site not far away in West Texas. WCS, though, earlier this year asked the NRC to suspend review of its application.
Lowey’s “Safe and Secure Decommissioning Act of 2017,” H.R. 4441, would prohibit the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from approving exemptions from emergency preparedness and security regulations for closed nuclear power plants in which any spent fuel remains in wet storage. Dry storage is widely accepted to be safer in protecting people and the environment from any radiation release in the event of an incident at a nuclear power plant.
Finally, H.R 4440, the “Redistribution of Fines to Our Communities Act,” simply says that the “Secretary of Energy shall retain amounts collected for safety-related fines pursuant to section 234A of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and shall distribute the portion of those amounts that the Secretary determines appropriate to local governments to mitigate any economic impacts in connection with the closure of the nuclear facility with respect to which the fines were collected.”
All the bills, introduced on Nov. 16 with no co-sponsors, have been referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
A number of bills have been introduced this year to address the nation’s longstanding nuclear waste impasse, but most have failed to gain traction as Congress wrestles with issues such as tax reform and healthcare.
“Our next steps … are going to be working to get co-sponsors for the bill, and we are also going to reach out to the Energy and Commerce Committee for a hearing,” Burns said. “I think this is something where members in densely populated areas, members in the lower Hudson Valley, hopefully can get behind his. It’s not just an economic issue, it’s a safety issue.”