Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
3/27/2015
Action on nuclear waste reform took major strides this week as a bipartisan Senate bill emerged that would allow interim storage, while the Department of Energy announced that it would begin taking an active role in siting a consent-base interim storage facility.
A bipartisan group of Senators reintroduced legislation this week that would overhaul the nation’s nuclear waste policy by creating a new waste management organization and allowing the construction of an interim storage site. Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Maria Cantwell (D- Wash.), Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) put forth the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2015 this week. The legislation echoes a bill the group introduced in 2013 that never made it to mark-up. It contains language that would create a new federal waste management organization to take over spent nuclear fuel disposal from the Department of Energy, allow the construction of a consent-based pilot interim storage facility, and establish a new working capital fund in the U.S. Treasury where fees collected from the utilities would be deposited and which would not depend on the approval of Congressional appropriators. It also would provide DOE the ability to build additional consolidated interim storage facilities within 10 years, but after 10 years a site for a permanent repository would need to be selected.
The bill’s sponsors include the leadership from both the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee. “If we want to continue to have low-cost, clean power from nuclear reactors, which today produce about 60 percent of our country’s emission-free electricity, then we have to have a place to put the used nuclear fuel,” Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Alexander said in a statement. “That means we need to end the stalemate over what to do with our country’s nuclear waste by finding a way to create both temporary and permanent storage sites that would complement other solutions. This legislation, which is consistent with the president’s Blue Ribbon Commission, would do that by allowing state and local governments to compete for these facilities and the good-paying jobs that come with them.”
A consent-based pilot consolidated storage facility is the preferred strategy of the Department of Energy to satisfy the nation’s spent fuel disposal needs, but due to language in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act the Department cannot consider other sites beyond Yucca Mountain in Nevada without Congressional approval. The proposed legislation could help the Department clear that hurdle. In its Fiscal Year 2016 budget request the Department requested a reform that would enable it to move forward with its waste management strategy.
‘Affirmative Steps’ Towards Interim Storage
Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, meanwhile, said this week that the Department would begin to take “affirmative steps” to siting a consent-based pilot interim storage facility, during remarks made at the Bipartisan Policy Center. DOE has been working on generic analyses of how to move forward with an interim storage facility, but now DOE will take a much more proactive approach in talking with actual communities about hosting a facility. The Department will take a broad view of interested communities, Moniz said, and then work through various technical and consent-based requirements. While DOE work to site a facility, it cannot move forward with construction of a facility without congressional approval, Moniz said
According to Moniz, DOE does not have a particular site in mind to host a facility, but it will take a broad look at any community that expresses interest. “We have no particular communities in mind, in the sense that we are going to have an open process to invite communities to get educated in what we are doing,” Moniz said. “Some communities are more educated than others initially. I did mention, obviously, this case of the private storage site that has come forward in the last month. That’s an example of one community that has expressed interest in a storage site, but we are going to be looking broadly.” Groups in Texas, New Mexico, South Carolina, and Mississippi have all expressed initial interest in potentially hosting an interim site, but outside of Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas, none have progressed further than floating the idea.
