The Department of Energy this week unveiled a multi-million-dollar funding opportunity aimed at giving interested communities the tools to explore whether they could host an interim storage site for nuclear fuel.
The funding opportunity, which DOE announced in a press release Tuesday, would provide around $16 million in funding for six to eight awardees over a period of roughly two years: around 18 to 24 months. No single award would be greater than $2 million or smaller than $1 million, DOE said in a funding opportunity announcement.
DOE will host a webinar for prospective applicants Oct. 3, according to a Thursday press release. Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition Sam Brinton will attend, the release said.
Applicants are “encouraged, but not required” to submit a letter of intent to apply for funding by Oct. 20, DOE said in its guidelines. Applications are due Dec. 19.
According to the funding opportunity announcement, DOE will select “multiple geographically and institutionally diverse” communities for its award, who will make up what the agency dubbed “a consent-based siting consortia.”
As part of their responsibilities, communities who receive funding will have to develop processes for increasing stakeholder engagement on interim storage, such as town hall meetings or exploratory committees, the guidelines said. Awardees will also have to create strategies for increasing public knowledge about nuclear waste issues.
Applicants should “place special emphasis on ensuring that principles of equity and environmental justice are factored into the activities and clearly reflected in the application,” DOE said.
“With this funding, we are facilitating constructive, community-based discussions around the consensual solutions for storing spent nuclear fuel in order to harness the true power of clean nuclear energy,” energy secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement.
Rod McCullum, director of nuclear reactor decommissioning and used fuel at the prominent industry trade group the Nuclear Energy Institute, told RadWaste Monitor in a statement Tuesday that the organization welcomed “this important step in DOE’s ongoing efforts to develop Consolidated Interim Storage capability for used fuel.”
“The funding made available should provide for meaningful opportunities for study and dialogue on the process for siting such a storage facility – which would become an important part of America’s carbon free energy infrastructure,” McCullum said.
“We hope [DOE’s] efforts bear fruit,” a spokesperson for nuclear professional organization the American Nuclear Society told RadWaste Monitor in a statement Tuesday. The spokesperson added that “there is much more that Congress needs to do in order to re-establish a successful integrated nuclear waste management program for the country.”
Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.), who in March 2021 co-founded Congress’s Spent Fuel Solutions Caucus aimed at pressuring the government to take action on spent fuel storage, said in a statement Tuesday that he was “glad to see the Department of Energy taking another important step in the process of establishing a consent-based site for the storage of spent nuclear fuel.”
DOE’s new interim storage funding is among the Joe Biden administration’s first attempts to locate a willing host community for a federal interim storage site using a consent-based process as prescribed by the 2012 Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. The U.S. currently has no centralized facility to store the nearly 90,000 tons of spent fuel currently stranded at reactor sites nationwide
The only congressionally-authorized site for such a task — Nevada’s Yucca Mountain — remains little more than a construction site since the Barack Obama administration pulled the project’s funding.
On Tuesday, Nevada politicians announced that Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) planned to file a motion with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that, according to a press release from Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto would “ resume the adjudicatory portion of the licensing procedures so that Nevada may take specific additional steps aimed at stopping the project.”
As the feds start shopping for interim storage host communities, two private companies are already in the latter stages of developing sites of their own. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September 2021 granted a license to Waste Control Specialists-Orano USA joint venture Interim Storage Partners to build its proposed interim storage site in west Texas.
The agency recommended in July that a similar project proposed by Holtec International for southeastern New Mexico receive an operating license.
