News about the Department of Energy’s $26-million program to define consent-based siting of nuclear waste could drop next week, the agency’s top nuclear-energy official hinted Wednesday.
DOE is putting together what it calls a consent-based siting consortia to help the agency decide not which spots could be suitable for a federally operated interim storage site for nuclear waste, but what constitutes consent.
The agency has been mulling responses it got to the $26-million consent-based funding opportunity announcement that closed on Jan. 31 and “next week you should see some more news on that,” Kathryn Huff, DOE’s assistant secretary for energy for the Office of Nuclear Energy, said Wednesday in a presentation to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute.
Coined in the 2012 Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, consent-based siting is now loosely defined as a notion that every level of government of an affected territory has to allow the storage of nuclear waste in that territory.
DOE, which has long been legally required to take title of nuclear waste but has racked up millions in lawsuit damages for failing to do so after the political death of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository in Nye County, Nev., plans to use the consent-based process to build an interim repository for spent nuclear fuel from civilian power plants.
However, the agency is legally barred from building a federal interim storage site until it first builds a site such as Yucca Mountain. Congress has not seriously considered legislation that would change that since the failed Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2018.
After a March hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Huff said that it might be 10 to 15 years before DOE builds a federally operated interim storage facility.
Meanwhile, two private companies, the Orano-Waste Control Specialists Interim Storage Partners joint venture, and Holtec International have proposed building commercial interim storage sites in Texas and New Mexico, respectively. Both states have passed laws that would prohibit the construction of such facilities.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensed the Interim Storage Partners site in 2021. The Holtec site could be licensed by May, the NRC said recently.
