A bipartisan bill unveiled last week aims to move a California nuclear power plant’s spent fuel inventory to the top of the Department of Energy’s collection list for when it finally starts accepting nuclear waste for disposal.
If the “Spent Fuel Prioritization Act,” reintroduced Wednesday by Reps. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), became law, it would amend the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) to make San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) “one of the highest priority sites in the nation for [spent fuel] removal,” according to a press release from Levin’s office.
In particular, the bill would add language to the NWPA directing DOE to prioritize spent fuel removal from nuclear plants that are already decommissioned or in decommissioning, are located in highly populated areas or are at high risk of earthquake damage. SONGS, situated along the California coast about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, is also located west of the San Andreas fault line.
“We’ve made incredible progress in the last several years to advance the consent-based siting process at the Department of Energy,” Levin said in his Wednesday press release. “Now it’s time to pass this legislation and make the commonsense decision to prioritize particularly sensitive sites like San Onofre for the removal of spent nuclear fuel.”
As of Monday the bill had yet to be assigned to a committee. Levin brought forward a similar measure in 2019, which was referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee but never saw a vote.
As California looks to cut the line for spent fuel disposal, the feds are just beginning to explore what an interim storage project might look like. DOE is until March 4 accepting public comments on how it should go about siting a federal interim storage facility.
As for where that site could potentially be located, the Office of Nuclear Energy’s acting Director of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition Kim Petry told members of SONGS’s community advisory panel Thursday that the agency wasn’t “ruling anything out.”
