Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
10/23/2015
John Kotek, acting assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, this week avoided placing any specific time frame on DOE’s progress on establishing a defense-waste-only repository or its ability to get a pilot consolidated interim storage facility up and running.
Kotek said during his nomination hearing in front of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that planning for a defense repository “remains ongoing” while progress on interim storage “should see developments” if appropriations meet DOE’s needs in the coming years. Kotek’s answers came in response to questions from committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), respectively, regarding DOE’s ability to move forward with each project. Kotek, though, emphasized the administration remains committed to consent-based siting for waste sites, even if it takes time.
“The administration is committed to a consent-based siting process that involves working with states, tribes, and local government in a way that leads to siting agreements with local and informed host communities for those facilities,” Kotek said. “As we learned through the Blue Ribbon Commission, communities, states, and tribes are going to need to answer two fundamental questions when it comes to their willingness to host such facilities. One is: can we do this in a way that is fully protective of people and the environment. Second is: can our community feel better off for taking on this challenge. So, it will be incumbent upon us to provide technical resources and other assets to them as they work through answering those questions.”
A consent-based pilot consolidated storage facility is the Department of Energy’s preferred strategy to satisfy the nation’s spent fuel disposal needs— approximately 75,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel. However, language in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act prevents the department from considering other sites beyond Yucca Mountain in Nevada without congressional approval. The administration’s waste management strategy, released in 2013, called for the construction of a pilot interim storage facility by 2021, but that date seems unlikely given the lack of progress in the past two years.
Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, though, announced in March that DOE would begin to take “affirmative steps” to site a consent-based pilot interim storage facility. DOE has been working on generic analyses of how to move forward with an interim storage facility, but now will take a much more proactive approach in talking with actual communities about hosting a site, Moniz said. Construction of a facility, though, cannot occur without congressional approval.
In that same announcement, Moniz said DOE would begin working on a separate track to construct a repository for defense waste previously directed for disposal with commercial waste. DOE is responsible for the disposition of about 27,000 cubic meters of high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel as a result of defense activities. DOE has yet to announce any formal processes or strategy for moving that program forward, though.
