The nongovernmental organization representing communities near Department of Energy facilities around the nation is urging Senate leaders to commit to ending the federal government’s dithering over building a disposal facility for the nation’s nuclear waste.
The United States holds roughly 100,000 metric tons of waste that by law must go into a permanent repository, which Congress in 1987 designated would be built under Yucca Mountain in Nevada. About 80,000 tons of that is spent fuel from commercial nuclear power reactors, with much of the rest consisting of high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations. That material remains held on-site at DOE locations including the Hanford Site in Washington state and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina – near communities represented by the Washington, D.C.-based Energy Communities Alliance.
“Our communities have operated in good faith based on federal law, as codified in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, that the sites would not become permanent waste storage sites, and defense waste would ultimately be disposed of in a geologic repository,” ECA Chair Ron Woody, county executive for Roane County, Tenn., near DOE’s Oak Ridge Site, wrote in a Jan. 16 letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). “However, with politics rather than science driving policy, our communities, especially including those around the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York, have become – and look to remain – de facto interim storage sites they were never intended to be.”
Woody called on Congress to provide funding to complete the long-frozen licensing of Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository, “in pursuit of confirming it is safe or even lessons learned, but ultimately to fulfill its commitment to our communities that have long supported the nation’s national security mission.”
The Energy Department filed its license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008 during the George W. Bush administration, but the Obama administration defunded the proceeding two years later. The Trump administration has proposed funding for licensing in its last two budget proposals, but has been shot down both times by Congress.
