The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not set a schedule or a budget for rebuilding a database of documents crucial to the Department of Energy’s application to license Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent nuclear waste repository, NRC Chairman Kristine Svinicki told Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) on May 1.
Svinicki was replying to a letter Heller sent the commission in March, in which Nevada’s senior senator asked for details about the NRC’s now 4-year-old $330 million estimate to complete licensing the facility, and about how the commission would spend the roughly $48 million in requested in fiscal 2019 for licensing activities.
Heller, who is up for re-election this year and faces a credibly electable opponent in Rep. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), strongly opposes storing waste at Yucca or developing it for any reason at all. The Donald Trump administration wants to license and build the repository, which has largely been on hold since the Barack Obama administration defunded the Department of Energy’s (DOE) license application.
In her letter to Heller, which the NRC posted online, Svinicki said the money the commission seeks this year for Yucca Mountain would be split about evenly between civil servants and contractors. She added that the agency has not yet decided how much of the requested funding would go toward resonstituting the Licensing Support Network, or toward acquiring a facility in Nevada to judge DOE’s license application, should it really resume.
“Both of these matters are subject to Commission decisions that have not yet been made,” Svinicki wrote.
Congress declared Yucca Mountain the sole repository for U.S. nuclear waste in 1987, but staunch opposition in Nevada and national politics have prevented DOE from even obtaining the NRC license that would permit the agency to build the facility.
