The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in May spent $2,859 from its remaining Nuclear Waste Fund balance, breaking its streak of using next-to-nothing from the account intended to pay for the repository under Yucca Mountain, Nev.
Since early 2019, the regulator had each month spent a few hundred dollars on unspecified program planning and support. It applied $282 toward that work in May, but also $2,577 for knowledge management reports, according to the Nuclear Waste Fund update submitted to Congress on July 1.
The spending leaves an unobligated carryover balance of $421,705. The full balance is $$427,225, but the agency owes $5,520 on contracts to the Center for Nuclear Waste Regulatory Analyses.
The Nuclear Waste Fund was established under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act to pay for a geologic repository for U.S. high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. Congress in 1987 amended the bill to direct the waste to the federal property about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008 received the license application for Yucca Mountain from the Department of Energy, during the George W. Bush administration. The Barack Obama administration defunded the licensing proceeding two years later, but a federal appeals court in August 2013 ordered the NRC to resume its work on the application.
The regulator at the time had slightly more than $13.5 million in carryover from the fund. It has since spent just over $13.1 million of that. The leading expenses were nearly $8.4 million to complete a safety evaluation report on the project, almost $1.6 million on a supplement to the draft environmental impact statement, and over $1.1 million to transfer documents related to licensing into the NRC’s public documents database.
It seems unlikely Congress will appropriate additional money from the Nuclear Waste Fund for the agency anytime soon. The Trump administration proposed in three consecutive budget plans to resume licensing for Yucca Mountain, but was rebuffed each time on Capitol Hill. For the upcoming fiscal 2021, it is asking only for $27.5 million at the Energy Department for work focused on centralized, interim storage of radioactive waste.
