The legislative process could prove an obstacle to the Department of Energy’s goal to get a federal interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel up and running within a decade or so, an agency official said during a recent webinar.
DOE’s prediction that its proposed interim storage site could be open in 10-15 years is, among other things, dependent on a “timely” change to federal nuclear waste law currently barring the agency from breaking ground on such a project, senior policy advisor Kim Petry told members of the California stakeholder group Action for Spent Fuel Solutions Now during a webinar broadcast Oct. 28.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which governs DOE’s spent fuel operations, precludes the department from building an interim storage facility until a permanent repository is online. Currently, no such site exists — the only congressionally-authorized repository, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, has been on ice since 2010 when the Barack Obama administration pulled the project’s funding.
Because of the legal uncertainty, “the initial rough estimate is subject to change,” Petry said.
The DOE official poured more cold water on the agency’s projected timeline, saying that the consent-based siting process is “by nature phased, adaptive and collaborative.” The agency wants to “allow time for mutual learning with communities,” Petry said.
DOE has in recent months taken some initial steps in its most recent search for a community willing to host a federal interim storage site. The department in early October gave interested hosts until Dec. 19 to apply for roughly $16 million in government funding to be used for exploring interim storage.
The agency has said that it will pursue a consent-based approach to siting a federal interim storage site, a concept brought back into the nuclear waste lexicon by the 2012 Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.
Meanwhile, two private companies are already in the latter stages of developing sites of their own interim storage sites. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September 2021 granted a license to Waste Control Specialists-Orano USA joint venture Interim Storage Partners to build its proposed interim storage site in west Texas.
NRC is scheduled to make a licensing decision on a similar project proposed by Holtec International by February 2023.
