Waste Control Specialists is on track for an April submission of a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to operate an interim spent nuclear fuel storage facility on its property in Andrews County, Texas, company CEO and President Rod Baltzer said last week.
“So, what does this mean exactly? It means we should be the first in line at the NRC,” Baltzer wrote in a Jan. 20 blog post on the Waste Control Specialists website. “It also means that we are serious about our proposal to build a state of the art facility to store spent fuel.”
Waste Control Specialists would be first in line, but not by much — Holtec International expects to file a license application of its own with the NRC in June, a spokeswoman said by email Wednesday. Both companies plan to build interim spent fuel storage facilities under the Department of Energy’s “phased, adapted consent-based” plan for finding permanent resting places for tens of thousands of tons of spent reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The DOE siting program began formally in December after the Obama administration in 2010 halted funding for the Yucca Mountain geologic repository in Nevada and formed a blue-ribbon panel that in 2012 issued findings that emphasized the consent-based strategy in dealing with the growing amounts of waste.
Waste Control Specialists on Feb. 5, 2015, submitted a notice of intent to seek an interim storage license from the NRC. The company notified the agency of its plan to submit its license application in spring 2016 and to have the site open for business before the close of 2020. That would allow for a three-year NRC review that WCS expects to end with the approval of a 40-year license in June 2019.
Holtec anticipates its HI-STORE site would also be ready to accept fuel by 2020, the company spokeswoman said.
