A group of six scientists and nuclear waste experts on Monday renewed their call for Congress to fund the frozen federal licensing of the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada.
Advancing the licensing is both required by law and necessary to avoid extending the “financial liabilities” and potential environmental threats of keeping tens of thousands of tons of radioactive waste spread around the country, the six members of the Sustainable Fuel Cycle Task Force Science Panel wrote in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
“[W]e request your support to move forward our Nation’s currently stalled nuclear waste program,” according to the letter. “In accordance with law and societal need, we urge you to do all that is possible to obtain the necessary funding to resume the critical Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing of Yucca Mountain.”
The call for action is in line with previous letters to Congress from the panel dating at least to 2009, according to its website.
The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act directed the Department of Energy to by Jan. 31, 1998, begin disposal of spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants and other high-level radioactive waste. The law was amended five years later to direct that the waste be buried under Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The George W. Bush administration DOE filed its license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008, but the Obama administration defunded the proceeding two years later. Congress has already rejected two attempts by the Trump administration to fund resumption of licensing.
Appropriations legislation passed by the House in June again zeroed out the White House request for Yucca funding. The Senate has yet to issue any appropriations bills for the upcoming fiscal 2020, which begins Oct. 1, but the upper chamber in recent years has not been friendly to licensing the disposal site.
“It is the collective view of our Panel that it is essential that we move forward with implementing our national repository program and leave our country a better place for future generations,” the six Ph.D.s wrote.
