WASHINGTON — As federal budget season wears on, details are still scarce on the Joe Biden administration’s plans for a federal interim storage site for the nation’s spent nuclear fuel, and one key appropriator isn’t happy with the lack of specifics.
Asked after a Department of Energy budget hearing Wednesday in the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee what her office was looking for in an administration interim storage strategy, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chair, (D-Calif.) said “I wish I knew.”
“We’re looking to see what is planned, and where it’s planned, and to see that the safeguards are appropriate,” she told RadWaste Monitor after the Wednesday hearing.
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm told Feinstein during the hearing that DOE’s consent-based siting inquiry would kick off this summer. Initial requests for information will go out to potential host communities “within the next month,” Granholm said.
Granholm, pressed by Feinstein on the Biden administration’s exact plan to deal with the country’s nuclear waste inventory, said that DOE wants to “get another site — not Yucca Mountain — but another place to store nuclear waste.”
“There is some interest out there,” Granholm said, although she didn’t elaborate on where that interest came from.
For the 2022 fiscal year, DOE requested around $20 million for a consent-based siting process, a term popularized with the Obama administration’s 2012 Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. Essentially, it means that every level of government, federal, state, local and tribal, must consent to hosting a nuclear waste repository before the repository is built somewhere in a state’s territory.
As she has at other times in her early days as energy secretary, Granholm on Wednesday fielded more questions about the moribund Yucca Mountain geologic repository. Asked by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) why DOE hadn’t included funding for Yucca Mountain in its budget request, Granholm reiterated that the Biden administration doesn’t support the site, which has been in development limbo since the Obama administration in 2011 rescinded DOE’s application license the facility with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Granholm also restated her department’s support for keeping the nation’s existing nuclear fleet online.
“Nuclear must be a part of our strategy to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions,” Granholm said. “We should be doing everything we can to keep existing nuclear plants online.” Granholm told Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) that the Biden administration’s proposed American Jobs Plan included a provision that would accomplish that goal. Indeed, the plan asked for $750 million to be used as a credit program to subsidize operating nuclear reactors.
