In a sort of paperwork anti-milestone, the Department of Energy last week asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to terminate a materials license for an unbuilt nuclear fuel handling facility once planned for Butte County, Idaho.
“The decision has been made that the facility will not be constructed and therefore the License should be terminated,” reads a Nov. 26 letter to the commission from Mark Brown, manager of DOE’s Idaho Cleanup Project, DOE’s representative to the NRC for the license. NRC uploaded the letter to its website Tuesday.
Issued in 2009, the license for the Idaho Spent Fuel Facility (ISFF), envisioned as a last-stop pack-and-ship for agency-owned spent fuel on its way to a deep geologic disposal site, expired Nov. 30.
DOE had signalled for years that the facility, tied so closely to the Yucca Mountain repository that was defunded in 2010, probably would not get built. As recently as 2019, as part of a public engagement process about another program at the Idaho National Laboratory, DOE wrote that construction of the ISFF was “unlikely to happen.”
Tethered as it was to the fate of Yucca, the only deep geologic repository for high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel for which the U.S. government has made much policy, ISFF never came very close to being built.
One of the earlier DOE estimates, from 2008, put the total cost of the project at more than half a billion dollars. Subsequent DOE budget requests estimate that if construction ever started on the facility, it would take until some time this decade to complete. An estimate from 2014 said it might take as long as 2026, while another estimate a year later said it could have been done by 2020.
