Consent-based siting of nuclear waste is a-political official says

The Department of Energy’s drive to site an interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel was designed to survive the consequences of U.S. elections and seesawing annual appropriations, an agency official said Thursday.

“We’re creating a process that is agnostic of politics,” Marla Morales, director of the Office of Consent Based Siting in the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, said Thursday in a webinar about global spent nuclear fuel disposal, cohosted by the International Atomic Energy Agency and others.

Morales leads the DOE office in charge of the agency’s consent-based siting consortia: a group that has spread agency grant money among local groups interested in helping the federal government define what consent is and who may give it, when it comes to storage of radioactive waste.

Morales spoke the morning after Republicans clinched control of the House of Representatives, cementing their control of the federal government for at least the next two years, with President-elect Donald Trump (R) ticketed for another four years in the White House.

Some Trump allies, including the authors of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership at the Heritage Foundation, have called for licensing the congressionally authorized, but long-abandoned, deep geologic repository proposed for Yucca Mountain in Nevada. 

Trump himself, on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, recently said there was “a little danger in nuclear.” Trump also opposed restarting the Yucca project during his first reelection bid, though early in his first term he proposed resuming the licensing proceedings abandoned by his predecessor, President Barack Obama (D).

Trump will be sworn into office, for the second time, on Jan. 20. That same month, DOE’s Consent Based Siting Office will release a consent-based siting year-in-review, plus a revision to its existing consent-based siting process, Morales said Thursday. 

Under the existing version of the consent-based process, DOE planned in 2025 to begin seeking volunteers willing to discuss the hosting of a federally owned interim storage facility. DOE plans to design that facility, which it may not yet legally build, with contractor help. 

DOE plans to mature the design of its interim storage facility to the Critical Decision 2 milestone, Morales said in September. That is the point in DOE project management that immediately precedes construction. 

DOE issued a request for information about designing an interim storage facility in July. Responses to the request were due in early September.