PHOENIX — Opening a federally-run interim storage facility for the nation’s stranded spent nuclear fuel inventory might not be the only way the Department of Energy could declare victory in its most recent effort to build one, the agency’s nuclear waste lead said here this week.
DOE’s consent-based approach for siting a federal interim storage facility is “by its very nature, phased, adaptive and collaborative,” said Kim Petry, deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition (NE-8), during a panel discussion Wednesday at the Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix.
Ideally, Petry said, the agency’s consent-based siting strategy, recommended in 2012 by the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, will end with a “consent-based hosting agreement” between a host community and DOE. The process could also culminate with “a determination that, after exploring the options, that community is just not interested,” she said.
For Petry and DOE, both are successful outcomes — even though only one would realize the agency’s interim storage aims.
Asked by RadWaste Monitor to expand on DOE’s view of a successful consent-based siting effort, Petry said that the agency has “to start somewhere.”
“The first step is really to engage with communities,” Petry said. “Getting to the point where we can actually ask for volunteers and negotiate a consent agreement with one or more communities, that will be ideal.”
The process should evolve over time, as DOE engages with more and more communities, Petry added. “There are things that we’ll learn over the next year or so that may actually change how we think the program should be implemented,” she said. “We might not know exactly where we’ll be in two years.”
Ultimately, a consent agreement would be a welcome outcome for the agency, Petry said. “A negotiated consent agreement will definitely be a huge flag that we are successful,” she said.
Meanwhile, Petry on Tuesday appeared to roll back past DOE statements about how long siting a federal interim storage site might take. “There are so many moving pieces that we can’t say for sure that we’re going to get it done in X number of years,” she said. “We’re trying to avoid that because we don’t know exactly how long it will take.”
During an agency webinar in October, then-NE-8 Sam Brinton said that DOE would be able to build a federal interim storage facility “within the decade, if not fifteen years.” Erica Bickford, acting director of DOE’s Integrated Waste Management Program, said at the time that that timeline could be subject to change, but that the department has to “start with some kind of plan.”
The U.S. currently has no centralized repository for its roughly 90,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. The only site congressionally-designated for such a task, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, has been on hold since 2010, when the Barack Obama administration pulled the project’s funding. The Joe Biden White House has said that it would not resume work on Yucca Mountain.
