The Department of Energy is working on a “strategic approach” for developing a federal interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel, the Secretary of Energy told members of Congress this week.
Jennifer Granholm, testifying Thursday on DOE’s 2022 budget request before the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee Thursday, said the department “want[s] to use, and we will use, the $20 million this committee included in the FY 2021 bill to make progress on that interim storage.”
Granholm said that progress might look like agency requests for information, stakeholder engagement and funding for interested communities to “explore the concept of consent-based siting of a federal interim storage facility.” More information on that will be announced in the coming months, she said.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who chairs the energy and water panel, said she was glad to hear that the administration was working on a spent fuel solution.
“I think many members of this committee, maybe all, share a deep concern about [nuclear waste],” Kaptur said. “I think linking whatever is going to be proposed to your place-based strategy for long term development holds great potential for places in the country that are still digging out from the 2008 recession,” she said.
So-called consent-based siting has been front-and-center in the federal discourse about nuclear waste storage since inauguration day. Nevada Democrats reintroduced a bill in March that would require DOE to involve local and state governments as well as indigenous tribes in siting future federal waste repositories. Granholm expressed support for the concept during an April 8 White House press briefing.
Meanwhile on Thursday, the energy secretary also addressed nuclear power plant closures. Answering a question from Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) about the role of the existing nuclear fleet in the department’s budget, Granholm said that while her agency hasn’t normally subsidized nuclear plants it was “a moment to consider” ways to keep the current fleet active.
The American Jobs Plan, which the Joe Biden administration introduced at the end of March, has provisions for clean energy subsidies that include nuclear, Granholm said. She also didn’t rule out the possibility of a direct subsidy to nuclear plants to help them stay open, saying that it was an “open question.”
Plant closures are another hot-button issue on Capitol Hill. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) penned a letter to the Biden administration April 20 urging them to take action to stem the tide of shutdowns.
After Indian Point Energy Center in New York shut down on April 30, there are still three more nuclear plants that are still slated to shut down in 2021. Two of them — the Byron and Dresden Nuclear Generating Stations — are located in Bustos’s home state of Illinois. The Palisades plant in Michigan is the third that should go dark later in the year.
Granholm also told Rep. Bonnie Watsoncoleman (D-N.J.) Thursday that, in addition to its efforts to consolidate spent fuel, DOE was keeping spent-fuel reprocessing research and development in mind, given the national backlog of 90,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel stranded at nuclear power plants nationwide.
“Of course, we are interested in figuring out what to do with the existing boatload of waste, spent fuel, that we already have out there too, but both are happening,” Granholm said.
