The U.S. Department of Energy remains committed to meeting its legal mandate for permanent disposal of 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 energy secretary.
“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.”
The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act gave DOE until Jan. 31, 1998, to begin disposal of U.S. high-level radioactive waste and spent reactor fuel. A 1987 congressional amendment to the legislation designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the disposal repository, but the facility has not been licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, much less built.
Failure to meet its legal mandate has already cost the federal government more than $6 billion in payments to nuclear utilities, with tens of billions in potential liabilities remaining.
The Bush administration Energy Department submitted its license application for Yucca Mountain in 2008, but the agency suspended the process in 2010 under the Obama administration. However, with President Donald Trump taking office last January, DOE has refocused on Yucca Mountain.
In its fiscal 2018 budget proposal, the department requested $110 million to resume its license application to build the underground repository, along with $10 million to work on interim storage facilities that would hold the fuel until Yucca is ready. 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 is scheduled to be released on Feb. 12. He also demurred on discussing other details of the department’s strategy for nuclear waste management, such as whether it would resume the Obama administration’s “consent-based” approach to storage and permanent disposal only in willing communities.
The DOE web page on consent-based siting has featured a placeholder message for the better part of the Trump administration: “We are currently updating our website to reflect the Department’s priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Perry.”
Speaking at the INMM event, an NRC official noted the agency is also waiting to see if it will receive the $30 million it requested for fiscal 2018 to process the license application. “We know as much as you all know about this,” Scott Moore, deputy director for the regulator’s Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, told attendees.
Industry and government participants at the three-day conference noted the lack of progress in resolving the nuclear-waste impasse in what had been expected to be a good year following the retirement of influential anti-Yucca Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the White House’s show of support for the project.
“There are a lot of things that are the same because nothing’s changed,” Eric Knox, a former DOE official and current vice president with AECOM, said during a panel discussion on the political outlook for spent fuel disposal. “Last year I think everybody did have great expectations. But this roller-coaster that is nuclear waste, there are highs and lows, and this year I think we’re kind of in the low expectations.”
Along with the stalled budget requests, only one of the numerous nuclear waste bills introduced in the latest Congress has made it out of committee. Rep. John Shimkus’ (R-Ill.) Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act is broadly intended to strengthen the federal government’s hand in building the Yucca Mountain repository. The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 49-4 in favor of the bill in June, but it is still waiting on a floor vote.
That strong bipartisan support is significant given the deep divides in Congress, Knox said. He asked the audience to show hands if they believed the bill would pass a House vote: many did, but there was little to no optimism about its chances in the Senate. The upper chamber is generally more skeptical of Yucca Mountain than the House, and common wisdom has been that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would not allow a vote on a bill that could be politically damaging to Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), a Yucca opponent who is already facing a tough re-election primary campaign.
