As the Department of Energy inches towards the March deadline for its federal interim storage information request, the agency’s nuclear energy chief is impressed with some of the responses already rolling in, she said this week.
“We’re coming into this with a pretty open mind as to what [a federal interim storage site] should look like, and people are ready to put anything into your mind if it’s open,” said Kathryn Huff, head of DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy (NE), during a virtual webinar hosted Thursday by nuclear advocacy group Nuclear Matters.
DOE in November published a Request for Information (RFI) aimed at canvassing potential stakeholders for input on how the agency should go about siting a federal interim storage facility for the nation’s spent nuclear fuel. The RFI is seeking public input about the siting process, not volunteers to host a site. The deadline for responses to the RFI is March 4.
While Huff declined to say how many responses DOE had gotten so far, she said that the input she’s seen is “very creative.”
“There are a lot of stakeholders in this country,” Huff said, “full of brilliant minds that care about how we’re going to approach this in a way that recognizes the energy justice and economic issues around it, but also recognizes that [spent] fuel is currently stored safely in the current locations where it is.”
All responses to DOE’s request should become publicly available “shortly after the close of the RFI,” Huff said.
“I think it’s been a really interesting exercise, seeing the nuanced, brilliant ideas that folks have all across this country,” Huff said.
Even if DOE manages to get a willing host community for a federal interim storage facility, the agency has acknowledged that it can’t break ground on such a site without some changes to federal law. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) prevents the feds from building interim storage before a permanent repository for spent fuel exists — Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, the only site congressionally authorized for that duty, remains on ice.
Huff told RadWaste Monitor back in November that the current constraints of the NWPA “would need to be addressed” before an interim site could be built.
