Interim storage consortia progress report due in December, DOE official says

ARLINGTON, VA — Groups helping the Department of Energy define both consent and who may give it, when it comes to storage of spent nuclear fuel, will give the agency a progress report in December, an official said here Tuesday at an industry gathering.

That should give DOE time to incorporate feedback from the 13 groups, which the agency calls its consent based siting consortia, ahead of the agency’s planned search in fall 2025 for communities that might want to host a federally operated interim storage site for spent nuclear fuel, Marla Morales, acting director of DOE’s Office of Consent-Based Siting, said here in response to questions from the Exchange Monitor.

Morales spoke here on the first day of the National Cleanup Workshop, an annual gathering of contractors serving the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management and other parts of DOE.

In early 2026, the 13 consortia groups, which in 2023 split $26 million worth of funding to help with the early stages of DOE’s consent-based siting effort to find a willing host for a federally owned interim spent fuel repository, will issue their final report, Morales said.

DOE is forbidden by law from building an interim storage site until it constructions a permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel, such as the moribund Yucca Mountain that is still congressionally authorized but has proved, since its defunding in 2010, politically impossible for either Democrats or Republicans to build.

DOE is talking about when, and how federal law should be changed to accommodate construction of an interim storage site, the design of which DOE now plans to mature until the project management milestone called CD-2, which immediately precedes groundbreaking, Morales said.