KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – During the upcoming lame duck session, Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) hopes to get Congress to legally remove Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the exclusive domestic repository for high-level waste.
During an industry conference, Fleischmann emphasized the need to update the 1982 version of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which directed the Department of Energy to consider Yucca as the nation’s first and prime repository for spent nuclear fuel.
During the questions-and-answers portion of Fleischmann’s Wednesday keynote at the Energy Technology and Environmental Business Association (ETEBA) conference, the Tennessee lawmaker said this law change would facilitate the country’s efforts to reach a collaborative solution to nuclear waste disposal.
“We don’t want to cram that down. We saw the realities of Yucca, right,” Fleischmann said. “Where you went and said, “‘Here we’re going to build this,’ and now you must, you must, you must. Both parties, both presidents, have moved away from that and say, ‘Look, we don’t want to cram down.’ We don’t want to cram down. We want states like the great state of Tennessee, which has voluntarily been in this process…to participate in that.”
“We need a law change first,” Fleischmann finished.
DOE’s Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus, which is anchored in spent nuclear fuel management, has hit a snag in its plans due to Yucca Mountain being the sole legal deep geologic repository for high-level spent fuel. Yucca was authorized as the sole repository as a part of the amendments of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. However, the Barack Obama administration canceled the project.
DOE announced five states; Tennessee, Idaho, Utah, Oklahoma and Louisiana, to be participants in the program and have signed memorandums of understanding with them to advance negotiations. It later added West Virginia into the mix as the sixth state, until the state later dropped out in late September.
Several DOE officials said the agency expected to sign one or more hosting agreements with the states on the shortlist. However, nothing has been announced yet.
To help facilitate DOE’s efforts, President Donald Trump’s White House sent a draft legislative framework in July to Congress to authorize DOE to pick one or more campuses in willing states and repeal Yucca as the sole repository. DOE officials said that this piece of legislation could “unlock the full potential” of the campuses.
The nuclear campuses could exist within the current legal restriction of Yucca remaining the sole repository, but it would stunt the program’s envisioned expectations, DOE officials said last month at the Nuclear Cleanup Workshop.
The draft legislative framework would additionally encourage the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, to which Fleischmann also agreed with. Nuclear fuel reprocessing is a chemical process that extracts usable uranium and plutonium from spent nuclear fuel.
“But I really think we made a mistake in this country, and candidly, it was under the [Jimmy] Carter administration when we decided no longer to reprocess spent nuclear fuel,” Fleischmann told audience members. “Is it expensive? Yes, it is. But we can reclaim close to 96 percent of a spent fuel rod and use that fuel again.”
During the Carter administration, reprocessing was discontinued primarily because of proliferation concerns. While the Ronald Reagan administration lifted the U.S. ban on commercial fuel reprocessing, the technology struggled to find commercial success due to its lack of economic viability.
However, Fleischmann insisted recent advancements in technology have removed the production of plutonium during the reprocessing process, making it a viable way to help reduce the total spent fuel amount in the U.S. while providing more fuel for reactors.
“And with the technologies that are out there for our friends on the left, we have removed the potential problem of proliferation,” Fleischmann said. “I mean, the plutonium problem is gone. Okay, chemically gone. The French solved it. Other companies have solved it, and that’s kind of where we are.”
