The Department of Energy Tuesday 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 also plans to host a webinar for prospective applicants within two weeks or so, Tuesday’s guidelines said. As of Tuesday afternoon a date for such an event had yet to be announced. Applicants are “encouraged, but not required” to submit a letter of intent to apply for funding by Oct. 20, the agency said. 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.
The funding is among the 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.
