Ahead of the midterm elections, plans for disposing of spent nuclear fuel currently stranded at a California nuclear power plant are among the issues at play in one battle to represent the Golden State in Congress.
The issue of nuclear waste disposal is especially personal to the candidates for California’s 49th congressional district — incumbent Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) and challenger Brian Maryott (R). The district is home to San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), which has roughly 123 canisters of spent fuel stored on-site.
Both candidates have weighed in on how the federal government should unravel the problem.
For Maryott, part of the solution lies with Yucca Mountain, a moribund geologic repository in Nevada designated by Congress in 1987 as the nation’s centralized storage facility for spent nuclear fuel. The site has yet to be built or receive a shipment of waste — the Barack Obama administration in 2010 pulled the project’s funding and no administration since then has restarted it.
Despite that, Maryott told the Dana Point Times in May that, if elected, he would “immediately join the effort in Congress to restart the Yucca Mountain process.” An effort to bring the Nye County, Nev., repository online should be coupled with “tangible interim storage strategies,” Maryott said.
A spokesperson for Maryott’s campaign did not return a request for comment by deadline Friday clarifying the candidate’s position on Yucca Mountain.
Meanwhile, the incumbent Levin has taken steps during his time in Congress to push the feds towards a spent fuel storage solution. The congressman is a founding member of the Spent Nuclear Fuel Solutions Caucus and has introduced legislation aimed at paving the way for a federal interim storage facility.
The congressman is a proponent of the Department of Energy’s ongoing efforts to site such a facility, applauding the agency in September when it announced a competitive funding award for potential interim storage host communities totaling around $16 million.
“Communities around Yucca Mountain have not consented to storing the nation’s nuclear waste there, which is why the project has stalled under both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations,” a spokesperson for Levin told RadWaste Monitor via email Tuesday. “Instead of continuing the failed policy of the past, Rep. Levin and likeminded colleagues have successfully secured $40 million for the Department of Energy to advance a consent-based siting process for our nation’s spent nuclear fuel.”
The Los Angeles Times editorial board on Oct. 7 endorsed Levin’s re-election and commended his efforts to find a disposal pathway for SONGS’s spent fuel, saying that he “is right that the top priority now is to move the waste away from active fault lines and millions of people.”
SONGS, located along the California coast about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, has been shuttered since 2013. Operator Southern California Edison is currently decommissioning the facility.
