President Donald Trump, the Department of Energy, and Congress must take steps to advance the program to find a final resting place for the United States’ massive holdings of spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste, the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council said Wednesday.
“It has been more than 30 years since enactment of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA); more than 18 years since the federal government failed to meet its statutory and contractual obligation to begin removing used fuel from nuclear energy reactor sites; more than eight years since the license application review process by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) began; and more than six years since the Obama Administration defunded the repository program and vacated the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM),” the industry group’s Backend Working Group said in an issue brief.
This situation has opened the federal government up to $25 billion (and counting) in liabilities from utilities left to store and manage the spent fuel, the brief says. Meanwhile, the Obama administration in 2010 canceled the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada and replaced it with a “consent-based” plan for selecting separate commercial and defense waste storage sites. The Trump administration has not yet announced its strategy, but there are rumblings that the Yucca Mountain project could be revived.
There is today some 75,000 metric tons of spent commercial fuel stored at nuclear plants around the nation, plus another 14,000 metric tons equivalent of defense waste, Andrew Griffith, deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition, said Wednesday at the Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix.
The USNIC brief offers a number of recommendations, including: obtaining a Nuclear Regulatory Commission ruling on the Yucca Mountain license; pursuing consolidated interim siting of spent fuel; and preparing the infrastructure for transport of used fuel and high-level waste.