Happy New Year, nuke-watchers, and welcome to 2023’s first issue of RadWaste Monitor, where we’ll take a look ahead at some of the issues looming for industry and government in the unfolding year.
After months of back-and-forth, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could license a second private interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel early this year.
The agency review of Holtec International’s proposed facility in southeast New Mexico had been the subject of several delays in recent months as NRC made multiple requests to the company for additional information needed for the facility’s safety analysis. The company submitted its latest responses in November.
These procedural delays, however, don’t appear to put the Holtec project in much jeopardy — in a July environmental impact statement, agency staff recommended the proposed interim storage site be granted a license.
Holtec’s proposed site could get NRC’s blessing just over a year after a similar project, proposed by Orano-Waste Control Specialists joint venture Interim Storage Partners (ISP) for west Texas, got its own federal license. That site had yet to break ground.
If built, Holtec has said that its proposed site would initially be able to store around 8,700 tons of spent nuclear fuel in 500 canisters. That capacity could be increased by 10,000 canisters via future license amendments.
The ISP site, meanwhile, could store around 40,000 tons of spent fuel, about half the nation’s existing inventory.
Although private interim storage efforts could make some progress in the regulatory space, they’re not out of the woods yet. Both the Holtec and ISP sites could be affected by pending lawsuits brought by their would-be host states.
The outcomes of three separate lawsuits currently under review could help or hinder the progress of Holtec and ISP’s interim storage efforts.
The states of Texas and New Mexico, along with a cadre of anti-nuclear groups and other stakeholders, challenged NRC in federal court last year, arguing, among other things, that the agency exceeded its legal authority when it decided in September 2021 to license the proposed ISP site.
The plaintiffs all have argued that the commission ran afoul of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), which they argue forbids the federal government from granting a license to any interim storage project until a permanent spent fuel repository is operational.
NRC has countered that its authority to license a private site comes from the Atomic Energy Act, not the NWPA, and that existing precedent allows the agency to license away-from-reactor spent fuel storage, including the proposed interim storage projects.
These arguments got their first legal tests in 2022.
During a November oral argument in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in which a coalition of environmental groups including Beyond Nuclear and Don’t Waste Michigan has sued NRC, a panel of judges cast doubt on the plaintiffs’ legal standing to challenge the agency’s licensing decision in the first place.
Meanwhile, judges in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — the home of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit against NRC — needled the agency over its authority to license private interim storage sites.
Judges presiding over those two cases, and a third filed in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals by New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas, had yet to make any ruling on whether NRC broke the law by licensing a private interim storage site. Those decisions, when they come, could prove an additional thorn in the side of interim storage proponents.
The Department of Energy should take its next steps in its own effort to site a federally-operated interim storage facility.
The agency is accepting applications for a roughly $16 million funding opportunity that it has said will be disseminated to communities interested in possibly taking on such a project.
According to a funding opportunity announcement, the agency will select “multiple geographically and institutionally diverse” communities for its award, who will make up what DOE has dubbed “a consent-based siting consortia.”
Applications for the interim storage funding opportunity are due Jan. 31.
DOE has said that it is not yet seeking volunteers to host a federal interim storage site, but that it aims to have such a facility open within a decade or so.
The agency has also acknowledged, however, that a federal interim storage facility can’t actually be built without changing the law — the NWPA forbids the feds from doing so without first building a permanent repository.
Some members of Congress are not optimistic that such a change can be made in the short term. Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.), a member of the congressional Spent Nuclear Fuel Solutions Caucus, told RadWaste Monitor in December that he felt, with current legislative deadlock, such a task was too heavy a lift.
Meanwhile, the U.S. currently has no centralized facility to store nearly 90,000 tons of spent fuel currently stranded at reactor sites across the country. The only congressionally-designated facility for such a task, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, remains unfinished after the Barack Obama administration in 2010 pulled the project’s funding.
The Department of Energy should also give out its next round of bailouts to economically-troubled nuclear power plants this year.
Nuclear plant operators who were planning to shutter their facilities might get a new lease on life in January as part of the second round of DOE’s civil nuclear credits program. The agency has said that it expects this month to open applications for the second chunk of payouts under the program, which last year began a five-year effort to dole out about $6 billion.
Under DOE’s first bailout cycle, applications were restricted to nuclear plants facing imminent closure. The lion’s share of that funding, around $1.1 billion, was awarded to California’s Diablo Canyon Power Plant, which was slated to shutter by 2025. The plant clinched the funding only after a parallel, state-level effort spearheaded by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) during Sacramento’s last legislative session.
This time around, however, funding will be available even to plant operators who have not publicly announced intentions to close, DOE has said.
According to law, DOE must spread its $6 billion in credits over a five-year period, which averages out to around $1.2 billion annually. The agency in September shifted the program’s award period to a calendar-year basis from a government fiscal-year basis, a move aimed at aligning the program with a nuclear production tax credit made law under August’s Inflation Reduction Act.
So far, only one plant operator has said it would throw in on DOE’s second round of credits — Holtec International, the decommissioning company that purchased Michigan’s shuttered Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in June. The company, which unsuccessfully bid on the first round of bailouts, has said that it would use the federal aid to solicit a willing buyer who would bring the facility back online.
