The U.S. Department of Energy remains committed to meeting its legal mandate to permanently dispose of the nation’s spent nuclear reactor fuel, but is waiting on Congress to provide the funding needed to push that program forward, a senior DOE official said Tuesday.
Resolving the decades-long impasse on the disposition of what is now more than 75,000 metric tons of used commercial reactor fuel will be necessary to promoting growth of nuclear power in the country, according to Raymond Furstenau, associate principal deputy assistant secretary in DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy.
“We’ve kind of laid it out there what we would like to do, restart the licensing the process for Yucca Mountain,” he said at the Institute for Nuclear Materials Management Spent Fuel Management Seminar in Alexandria, Va. “We’re really waiting for Congress to act so we can move forward.”
In its fiscal 2018 budget proposal, the Energy Department requested $120 million to resume its license application before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build the underground repository below Yucca Mountain, Nev., for spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The House has approved the funding, while Senate appropriators gave DOE nothing for the project in an energy appropriations bill still awaiting a floor vote.
In any case, Congress has yet to pass a full budget for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, 2017. The four stopgap measures passed to keep the federal government open have provided no money for Yucca Mountain. “So we’re kind of in limbo right now,” Furstenau said, noting that DOE is nonetheless making progress in other areas such as development of railcars that will eventually be used to transport the waste.
Furstenau said he could not yet comment on whether DOE would again request funding for Yucca Mountain licensing in the fiscal 2019 budget, which could land as early as next month.
