Fewer people than five years ago want to share ideas about how to site a federally owned interim storage site for nuclear waste, a Department of Energy official told the federal government’s nuclear agency Wednesday.
As of Tuesday, DOE had gotten just around 125 comments on its interim storage request for information (RFI) since the opportunity was unveiled in November, Alisa Trunzo, a DOE strategic communications specialist, told the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB) during a virtual meeting Wednesday. A similar RFI from January 2017 seeking public comment on DOE’s draft consent-based siting process netted around 450 responses, Trunzo said.
The deadline for the agency’s RFI, which aims to collect input on how it should go about selecting a location for a federal interim storage site, is Friday.
Trunzo told NWTRB that asking respondents to answer questions about interim storage twice in such a short period of time could be “a burden.”
“I think part of it is that people have weighed in before, and they don’t necessarily want to weigh in again,” Trunzo said. Regardless, DOE plans to consider feedback from both the 2017 RFI and the current info request as it nails down a process for siting federal interim storage, she said.
One major theme among the responses the agency received were concerns about whether DOE could legally pursue its interim storage inquiry under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), Trunzo said. The NWPA precludes the feds from establishing an interim storage facility until a permanent repository is in place. The only congressionally-authorized permanent storage site, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, has been on ice since 2011 when the Barack Obama administration cut its funding.
Trunzo said DOE believes that the law allows it to “proceed with the consent based siting process, negotiate an agreement with the host community and design and seek the license for an interim storage facility.” However, actually building and operating an interim storage site “would be subject to constraints in the law that would need to be addressed,” she said.
As the feds deliberate on interim storage, two private companies are taking the first steps to build similar sites in the southwestern U.S. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September licensed Waste Control Specialists-Orano USA joint venture Interim Storage Partners to build its proposed site in Andrews, Texas. Another project proposed by Holtec International is still under NRC licensing review.
