SUMMERLIN, NEV. — The Department of Energy’s plan to conduct market research about siting a federal interim spent fuel storage facility might amount to nothing if industry and spent fuel host communities do not raise a ruckus around it, a trade group executive said this week at the annual Decommissioning Strategy Forum.
Although a Department of Energy request for information (RFI) on interim storage is “imminent,” industry shouldn’t expect the request to say “here’s the answer” on the issue, said senior director of the Nuclear Energy Institute’s (NEI) fuel and decommissioning programs Rod McCullum at a Tuesday panel during the show hosted by Exchange Monitor.
“Expect it to be questions: questions to stakeholders, questions to communities,” McCullum said. “If DOE gets no response to that RFI, it probably won’t act boldly,” he said.
A spokesperson for DOE told RadWaste Monitor via email Oct. 26 that the agency’s RFI was still “working its way through the system.” Other than saying it will release the RFI eventually, the Joe Biden administration has not talked publicly at all about its plans for the nation’s spent fuel, which the federal government is obligated to take possession of, or else pay out penalties to the entities holding onto it.
So far, administration officials have said only that they will follow the Barack Obama administration’s proposed consent-based-siting model, which notionally prohibits building repositories anywhere that state, local and tribal governments have not consented to building one.
“I was hoping that this conference would occur against the backdrop of a request for information already being issued,” McCullum said Tuesday.
McCullum encouraged industry representatives gathered for Tuesday’s show to work with their respective communities and stakeholders “and everyone who’s interested in moving these materials.”
“I think as a community, we should all be thinking in terms of … how we respond to that [RFI], in ways that help DOE get energized,” McCullum said.
There are limited prospects for a federally operated interim storage site anyway, because federal law prohibits operating one before there is a permanent repository for spent fuel — something for which Congress and now three successive presidential administrations have shown little appetite for building.
Under 2022 spending bills awaiting reconciliation in Congress, the mothballed Yucca Mountain repository — the only congressionally authorized spent fuel repository — would get funding only for guns and gates, exactly as the Joe Biden administration requested.
