PHOENIX — The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy could be about a month away from beginning conceptual work on a federally owned interim storage facility, the head of the office said here.
The federal interim storage facility could hit the project management milestone known as Critical Decision 0, or CD-0, in the next month or six weeks, Paul Murray, DOE’s deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition, told the Exchange Monitor here on the sidelines of the annual Waste Management Symposia.
The project is waiting for approval by the deputy secretary of energy, Murray said. It cleared a key internal review “a couple weeks ago,” said Murray.
In DOE’s project management system, CD-0 is the milestone at which federal personnel formally identify a project they believe is needed to complete an agency mission.
Prior to the milestone, a project team hashes out a rough-order-of-magnitude cost estimate, which is vetted during an independent cost review conducted by people outside the project. The next step after that is sign off by the DOE No. 2.
The timeline Murray gave at this week’s industry conference was a little more specific than the forecast he provided in February, when he said the interim storage site would hit CD-0 in the spring and possibly reach CD-1 “this year.” CD-1 is the point at which DOE picks its preferred concept and compares it with alternatives before moving on with the project.
Under federal law, DOE is not allowed to build an interim storage site until it builds a permanent repository for spent fuel and nuclear waste. The agency has no funding for a permanent repository and Congress has been unwilling for more than 10 years to appropriate any, following the political death in 2010 of the federally authorized at Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev.
However, the Office of Nuclear Energy is allowed to take incremental steps toward an interim storage site, including designing one, building supporting technologies such as the Atlas rail car, and selecting a site to build one. The agency is using a consent-based siting process to locate a site in a willing host community and state.
According to the fiscal 2025 DOE budget request released on Monday, the consent-based siting process may not begin searching for a suitable site in the government fiscal year that runs through Sept. 30, 2026.
The office will spend fiscal year 2025 “preparing to move to Stage 2 in the Consent Based Siting Process,” the detailed budget request for Nuclear Energy reads. Stage two is the point in the process at which DOE “focuses on seeking volunteers interested in considering hosting a federal facility and conducting site suitability assessments,” according to the budget request.
