PHOENIX — The Department of Energy planned to give some cash to communities interested in hosting a federal interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel but the agency’s spent fuel czar declined to provide details during a panel discussion here Tuesday.
DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy is “in the development phases” of a funding opportunity it announced in January, acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition (NE-8) Kim Petry told Exchange Monitor during a panel Tuesday at the annual Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix. “We have some hoops to jump through in the federal government and interagency coordination,” she said.
Ideally, DOE should dole out federal cash to interested communities in “several phases,” Petry said. That money should come from the roughly $20 million the agency was allocated in fiscal 2021 for its interim storage inquiry.
Agency project manager Erica Bickford said during a separate panel on Monday that DOE did not plan to ask communities to volunteer as potential interim storage hosts during the funding opportunity. The agency is again pursuing the consent based siting process the Barack Obama administration introduced around 2015.
To that end, DOE recently wrapped up a comment period on a request for information (RFI) about methods the public thinks the government should use when choosing nuclear-waste storage sites. The agency will use that information to help it hammer out what the funding opportunity will look like, Petry said Tuesday.
“There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. We’re not really sure how some of these conversations will turn out, so it’s going to have to be an iterative process.”
The comment period for DOE’s interim storage RFI, unveiled in November, closed March 4. Petry said Tuesday that it could be a month or two before the agency is done reviewing the 200 or so comments it received.
Beyond interim storage, Petry said that DOE “expect[s] to apply a lot” of what it’s learned from the RFI to a potential future permanent repository inquiry.
As the federal government considers the details of its interim storage inquiry, private companies have already taken some initial steps on their own spent fuel projects. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September licensed Interim Storage Partners, a Waste Control Specialists-Orano joint venture, to build a proposed interim storage site in west Texas.
A similar site planned for New Mexico by Holtec International is also under NRC review. The company thinks it might get licensed by June.
