By the time the public comment period closes on the Energy Department’s draft plan for a Defense Waste Repository to house nuclear waste from military programs, the Donald Trump administration may already have decided if it wants DOE to pursue the project.
While routinely delivered late in a new president’s first year in office, the White House’s next federal budget request, in which the Trump administration would ask Congress to fund the Defense Waste Repository (DWR), is nominally due to Capitol Hill in the first week in February. The comment period on DOE’s newly released draft DWR plan closes March 20.
While it is unclear whether President-elect Trump would request funds for the proposed repository — he staffed his transition team with supporters of the suspended Yucca Mountain commercial and defense waste repository in Nevada that is a budgetary competitor of DWR — the ball is firmly in the White House’s court, at this point.
The Department of Energy remains confident it already has the legal authority to site and build DWR under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, provided the new president seeks funding for the facility and Congress approves that request.
“DOE believes it has all the authorities it needs to build the DWR,” an agency spokesperson in Washington, D.C., said by email Tuesday. “As for an appropriation, DOE issued its draft plan to share its thoughts on next steps and we look forward to the comments we receive. Additionally, we will await further direction from the new Administration.”
Lawmakers in the House, where enthusiasm for a Yucca restart is the strongest, dispute the agency’s stance and are poised to do DWR no favors.
“This year’s National Defense Authorization Act explicitly denied funding for a defense-only repository, so there will be no further work done until Congress takes further action,” an aide for the House Energy and Commerce Committee wrote in a Wednesday email. “We look forward to working with the incoming administration to provide for a comprehensive pathway to dispose of our nation’s spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.”
DOE estimates DWR will cost roughly $3 billion over 11 years just to site the proposed waste center and thoroughly characterize, or vet, the area’s suitability for long-term storage. That would be three years after a hypothetical second Trump term ends, if you start the clock on Jan. 20.
That averages out to an annual spending level of about $280 million for the first 11 years, according to a table in the draft plan DOE released Dec. 16. It will take roughly 30 years to complete DWR, the agency estimates. The last five of that, according to the draft plan, would be for construction. The agency provided no cost estimate for DWR in the draft plan.
“[T]he cost of a repository is highly uncertain,” DOE stated in the draft plan.
In 2008, the agency estimated it would cost nearly $100 billion to build and operate Yucca Mountain, which the Obama administration effectively canceled in 2010 after the government spent some $15 billion on development.
Much like DOE’s current plan for interim and final storage of commercial waste, the defense waste facility would be sited with consent from local communities. The central elements to the development of the facility, according to the plan, would be: the planned location process, preliminary summary schedule, and preliminary forecast of representatives expenses; the types and amounts of high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel designated for potential disposal in the facility; waste transport; and the site characteristics for permanent waste disposal.
DOE forecasts by 2048 having roughly 30,000 cubic meters of high-level waste and spent fuel from defense atomic energy and research and development operations at its Hanford, Idaho, and Savannah River sites, the report says.
Despite the beginnings of a political tug-of-war in Washington, on the local side of the equation, Yucca and DWR are not mutually exclusive propositions, and neither eliminates the need for the interim waste-storage efforts already underway, one advocacy group said this week.
Waste Control Specialists has already filed a license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build and operate a consolidated interim spent fuel storage site in West Texas. An application from Holtec is anticipated by March for a facility in southeastern New Mexico.
“With the new administration we expect that both interim storage sites and Yucca Mountain will move forward and we will wait to see whether they want to follow this path,” Seth Kirshenberg, executive director of the Energy Communities Alliance, wrote in a Tuesday email. “All of the communities want DOE to move forward with addressing HLW disposal — as quickly as possible.”
The Washington-based group Kirshenberg leads advocates for localities that host DOE nuclear cleanup operations.
Kirshenberg pointed out, as DOE did in its draft DWR plan, that “developing a safety case for a DWR can be simplified due to the lower thermal output and overall lower radioactivity of the wastes, compared to commercial spent nuclear fuel.”
