Two top Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday requested that Energy Secretary Rick Perry re-establish the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCWRM), so that the Energy Department will again have an office dedicated solely to nuclear waste policy.
Prior to being defunded in fiscal 2011, OCWRM was the DOE entity charged with carrying out the department’s obligation under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act to establish a permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste — designated in 1987 to be Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The White House last week included funding in its fiscal 2018 budget proposal to restart the Yucca Mountain licensing process with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Energy and Commerce holds congressional jurisdiction over nuclear waste management.
Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and environment subcomittee Chairman John Shimkus (R-Ill.) wrote in a letter to Perry that resuming Yucca Mountain licensing “is a critical step towards fixing a broken” nuclear waste management system. The lawmakers contended that disposing of nuclear waste demands a dedicated office, so DOE’s nuclear waste program is not competing with other nuclear priorities within the Office of Nuclear Energy.
Walden and Shimkus also asked Perry to walk back the Obama administration’s 2015 determination that DOE needs to build a separate deep-geological repository for high-level waste produced during the Cold War arms race with Russia. “We believe you should reassess the cost and schedule estimates that served as a basis for the 2015 decision, which GAO recently identified as areas of concern,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter to Perry.
Walden and Shimkus addressed consolidated interim storage for nuclear waste. Two private companies, Waste Control Specialists and Holtec International, are pursuing NRC licenses to operate storage facilities that could together hold 160,000 metric tons of spent fuel in West Texas and southeast New Mexico, respectively.
“If the Department determined that an interim storage facility is necessary, we expect you will work with us to amend the NWPA to allow a program to move forward in a way that protects national interests, protects taxpayers, and does not interfere with the long-standing policy that SNF and HLW must be permanently disposed of in a repository,” the letter reads.
