Communities interested in receiving federal funding to explore hosting an interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel now have through January to apply, the Department of Energy announced this week.
The deadline for DOE’s roughly $16 million interim storage funding opportunity is now Jan. 31, the agency announced in a Tweet Wednesday. Dec. 19 had been the cutoff for applications.
Unveiled in September, the multi-million dollar interim storage award would provide around $16 million in funding for six to eight awardees over a period of roughly two years: around 18 to 24 months. No single award would be greater than $2 million or smaller than $1 million.
According to a funding opportunity announcement, DOE will select “multiple geographically and institutionally diverse” communities for its award, who will make up what the agency dubbed “a consent-based siting consortia.”
During an Oct. 3 webinar, then-DOE Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition Sam Brinton said that while the agency was not yet seeking volunteers for interim storage, its focus for the funding opportunity was on the continental U.S., and that it would consider locations for more than one such facility.
DOE aims to have a federal interim storage facility open “within the decade, if not fifteen years,” Brinton said at the time.
The U.S. currently has no centralized facility to store nearly 90,000 tons of spent fuel currently stranded at reactor sites across the country. The only congressionally-designated facility for such a task, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, remains unfinished after the Barack Obama administration in 2010 pulled the project’s funding.
The Donald Trump administration’s effort to resume the licensing process for Yucca collapsed in 2018 and the Biden administration has said it will not fund Yucca Mountain.
