WASHINGTON — It will still be another decade or so before the Department of Energy identifies a willing host community for a federal interim storage site for spent nuclear fuel, a senior official said here.
“We probably won’t have constructed interim storage acceptance for 10 years, 15 years,” Kathryn Huff, the agency’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy, told the Exchange Monitor after a hearing here Thursday.
A pacing item is DOE’s ongoing, $26-million research effort to entice potential host communities to help the agency define what it means to consent to the potentially long-term, but not permanent, storage of spent nuclear fuel from nuclear power plants.
It will be “a couple years” before that effort concludes, Huff told Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) during a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Federal law prohibits DOE from building or operating a consolidated interim storage site until the agency builds a permanent repository. The only authorized repository, Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., is effectively dead because of longstanding political opposition from the state.
In Thursday’s hearing, which focused on the nuclear fuel cycle, Huff told Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) that Congress may need to “reevaluate” the “linkage” between a permanent and interim federal repository.
So far this session, Congress has shown no appetite to revisit that linkage, codified currently in the amended Nuclear Waste Policy Act.
Before Republicans took over the House last year, a united Democratic government struggled to pass some of the biggest legislation to touch the nuclear industry in years: the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Recovery Act.
The first bill provided bailouts for struggling nuclear power plants. The second included a production tax credit to help operating plants make the costs of generating nuclear power and maintaining reactors more competitive with cheaper options such as gas.
At Thursday’s hearing, Sen. Joe Manchin, the chair of the committee, said he considered the two bills Congress’ way of ensuring that nuclear power survived in the U.S. “into the next decade.”
During the hearing, Manchin invited witnesses, who aside from Huff included Constellation energy CEO Joe Dominguez and Idaho National Laboratory Director John Wagner, to appraise the effects last year’s big stimulus bills had on the U.S. electric grid.
Dominguez said the production credits were a “total game changer” for Constellation. Now, instead of talking about shutting reactors down, Constellation’s investors are becoming supportive of extending the company’s fleet.
“It allows our investors to support us when we’re extending the lives of the assets,” Dominguez said, answering a question from Manchin about the effects on the U.S. electric grid of nuclear tax credits. “The conversation for the last 10 years has been about closing nuclear plants. Now we’re in this welcome discussion about continuing their operation for generations to come.”
