The Department of Energy’s ongoing funding opportunity for communities interested in hosting a federal interim storage facility got a little larger this week after the agency announced it would tack on roughly $10 million in additional funding for the program.
The agency increased the total award for its interim storage funding opportunity to around $26 million, up $10 million from the $16 million or so included in the initial award unveiled in September, DOE said in a Monday press release.
The additional funding, approved by Congress in the 2023 omnibus spending bill signed in December, means that DOE can double the number of awards it plans to issue to around 16, the agency said.
According to September’s funding opportunity announcement, interim storage cash should be doled out to awardees over a period of 18 to 24 months. No single award would be greater than $2 million or less than $1 million, DOE has said.
The agency has also said that funding recipients should form a “consent-based siting consortia” comprising “multiple geographically and institutionally diverse” communities that would engage stakeholders and build consensus about strategies for siting a federal interim storage facility.
Applications for funding are due Jan. 31.
DOE begins its latest attempt to locate a willing host for an interim storage site as two private companies are angling to build similar facilities in the nation’s southwest.
A senior DOE official told members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Jan. 11 that it was “not clear” how such commercial sites would fit into the agency’s own interim storage siting effort.
There is currently no permanent repository for the nation’s roughly 90,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. The only facility with congressional approval for such a task, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, remains on ice after the Barack Obama administration in 2010 pulled the project’s funding. The Joe Biden administration has said that it would not resume work at Yucca Mountain.
