While the Joe Biden administration grapples with plans for a geologic repository for high-level waste to replace the stalled Yucca Mountain project in Nevada, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) urged the nominee to lead the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy office to prioritize a defense waste disposal site.
“I believe you should separate defense from commercial waste,” Cantwell told Kathryn Huff at Thursday’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “We could make some very rapid decisions about defense waste cleanup,” Cantwell said, if defense high-level waste is not lumped in with the more politically combustible issue of underground storage of spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants across the country.
Cantwell said she spends much of her effort in the Senate nowadays trying to secure funds for cleanup of the highly-contaminated Hanford Site in eastern Washington. The Waste Treatment Plant at Hanford, scheduled to start turning low-level tank waste into a glass form in late 2023, will eventually produce thousands of cannisters of immobilized high-level waste, which were initially supposed to go to Yucca Mountain and currently lack a disposal destination.
President Barack Obama effectively terminated plans for Yucca Mountain in 2010 and in 2015 endorsed the idea of developing two underground repositories, one for commercial and one for defense waste, according to an early 2017 Government Accountability Office report, which cast doubt on the economics of building two disposal sites.
During the hearing, Huff said the agency is working on a summary report on the recently-closed request for information on its proposed consent-based siting process for a federal interim spent fuel storage facility.
