ARLINGTON, Va. – Legislation challenges, particularly the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), could pose a potential roadblock to the full implementation of the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus, a Department of Energy official said.
During Wednesday’s session at the National Cleanup Workshop, several panels discussed the early progress of the innovation campuses. Marla Morales, DOE’s acting deputy assistant for spent fuel and high-level waste disposition, said the Office of Nuclear Energy would require removing the exclusivity of Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the sole repository.
President Donald Trump’s administration has released draft legislation, which Morales joked was the “worst best kept secret in Washington right now,” to remove Yucca as the sole repository. In the 1987 amendments to the NWPA, the federal government was legally required to dispose of high-level radioactive waste at the Yucca site. However, plans for the repository were met with pushback from the state of Nevada and were canceled during the Barack Obama administration.
Morales previously said the innovation campuses are driven by used fuel management, adding that this legislative change could allow for DOE to request appropriations to address permanent storage.
In a separate panel focused on the innovation campus program, EnergySolutions’ David Campbell and DOE’s Josh Jarrell also attested that this policy change to the NWPA is the most prominent challenge for the program. Jarrell said if the NWPA does not get changes this Congressional session, DOE can still move forward on the program, but it would stunt the program’s full potential.
“Obviously, if the Nuclear Waste Policy Act doesn’t change, and if we can’t do federal storage, we can do other sort of demonstration pilots in either, you know, sort of back end, but also recycling, versioning, and all of those things that are sort of open,” Jarrell said. “But it doesn’t get us to the real robust final, but really a robust agreement that allows us to really move out in a meaningful way.”
Campbell emphasized that this policy change is necessary and needs to be consistent to allow for these projects to continue for years to come. “It’s not the technology. It’s not the operation. It’s not even the state that hosts all the accommodations. It’s really the policy,” Campbell said.
Morales said some states have shown hesitancy to be the sole state responsible for managing waste, so DOE intends to have “one or more” campuses ultimately selected to be host communities for the campuses. This has led DOE to push for the removal of Yucca as the sole repository to accommodate potentially multiple repositories.