Senate appropriators indicated yesterday that they would like to include clarifying language in the budget that would enable the Department of Energy to use Waste Control Specialists as a consolidated interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel. Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) pressed Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz on what DOE would need to be able to use WCS, which plans to have a privately-funded storage facility ready by the end of 2020, during a hearing on DOE’s Fiscal Year 2016 budget request. “We would be interested in working on that in the next three to four weeks to see a) what might appropriately be included in the appropriations bill, if anything, and b) what might need to come in front of Sen. Murkowksi’s committee,” Alexander said on WCS. “The whole objective, and it sounds to me like you believe the private facility could be a realistic option, then, given our desire to find a place to put used nuclear fuel, is we need to know what else we need to do to put you in a position to move that option along.”
Moniz could not identify specifically what clarifying language would be needed, but he did say the idea of WCS looks attractive to the Department. “This new dynamic out of Texas is extremely interesting,” Moniz said. “First of all we want to learn more about that. With regard to authorities, I don’t know quite yet what those authorities would be, but I can certainly imagine that especially for a private sector facility a clarification might come out of the legislative process that would be quite desirable. We are certainly happy to work as often as you would like to discuss the technical aspects of this.”
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