The Donald Trump administration could save a lot of money by building a deep geologic repository just for Cold War nuclear waste, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said here Wednesday after his farewell speech to the Beltway press corps.
The key, Moniz told reporters after prepared remarks at the National Press Club, is whether the incoming Trump administration moves quickly on the defense-only waste facility — by no means a given, considering President-elect Trump has staffed his transition team with DOE veterans who support the Yucca Mountain civil-military waste repository the Obama administration canceled in 2009.
“[I]f there is a big geological repository established to handle lots and lots of [commercial] spent fuel and high-level [defense] waste, fine. Nothing that we have done precludes that going together,” Moniz said Wednesday. On the other hand, “if it appears that a defense waste repository could be realized well ahead of the spent fuel repository, then that will probably be a very attractive option.
“Time is worth a lot,” Moniz said, and starting a defense repository early would be “worth a lot of savings.”
In a draft plan released Dec. 16, DOE said a defense waste repository would cost roughly $3 billion over 11 years. That covers only the cost of finding a site for the proposed waste center and thoroughly characterizing, or vetting, that area’s suitability for long-term storage.
The department provided no life-cycle cost for the 30 years the agency estimates it would take to build the defense waste repository. A public comment period on the draft plan runs through March 20.
DOE believes it does not need congressional action, besides an appropriation, to build the defense waste repository. However, Republican leaders in Congress prefer a Yucca restart.
Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) put an exclamation mark on that preference this week, when he filed a bill that would forbid DOE from starting work on a defense waste repository before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission makes a final decision on a 2008 license application for Yucca — a Republican demand since President Barack Obama halted the licensing process for the mountain during his first term in office.
The text of Wilson’s bill cites then-President Ronald Reagan’s 1985 finding that nuclear waste from defense streams must be co-mingled. The Obama administration effectively undid that decision in 2015, with its own finding that DOE needed to develop a repository specifically for military nuclear waste.
In the short term, the fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act allowed none of the funding DOE requested to start early work on a defense-only repository. The agency sought some $15 million for the defense waste repository in the current budget year as part of the Obama administration’s consent-based siting program for nuclear waste storage.
As for a Yucca restart, the process is potentially lengthy.
The Trump administration would first have to request funding, which Congress would then have to approve, for a pair of hearings before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, a commission spokeswoman said Thursday.
The NRC was partway through the first hearing in 2011, when the Obama administration turned off the funding spigot. Even if the regulator authorized DOE to start building Yucca, the agency would still have to secure NRC approval to receive high-level waste and spent fuel at the facility — a process “subject to similar technical review and hearing processes as the construction authorization application,” according to the commission’s website.
