No, the Secretary of Energy said this week during the first budget hearing of the 2025 fiscal year, the Department of Energy does not plan to fund a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.
“I just want to ask you if you can quickly confirm on the record what the department’s fiscal year 25 funding request indicates, that DOE will not seek to license or otherwise force a nuclear waste repository in my home state,” Rep. Susie Lee (R-Nev.) asked Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm Wednesday during a hearing of the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee.
“I can confirm,” Granholm said.
DOE last year began a consent-based siting program for a federally operating interim storage facility, which the agency is allowed to design but not to build and operate until there is a permanent repository such as Yucca.
On Wednesday, in response to another question from Lee, Granholm said DOE would begin the second phase of the consent-based siting program for a federal interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel “soon.”
According to DOE’s 2025 budget request, that will not be until after the 2025 fiscal year, which runs through Sept. 30, 2025. Phase two is the part of the process where DOE will begin screening candidate sites, according to the agency’s 2023 consent-based siting report.
Pending changes in law, appropriations and selection of candidate sites, DOE could notionally build an interim storage facility in the 2030s, Paul Murray, DOE’s deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition has said.
In the meantime, DOE plans to proceed with early conceptual design of a federal interim storage facility this year, Murray said last week at an industry conference.
For fiscal year 2025 the administration of President Joe Biden (D) requested about $1.6 billion for the Office of Nuclear Energy, the part of DOE responsible for civilian nuclear waste. That would be down from almost $1.7 billion in fiscal year 2024, when Congress appropriated a little more money than the roughly $1.6 billion the White House sought for the current fiscal year.
President Donald Trump (R) was the most recent president to request money for a Yucca restart, though Trump eventually gave up the idea and announced in 2019 that he would not seek to open the high-level was repository that was abandoned in 2010 by then-President Barack Obama (D).
