The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has less than $500,000 left in its available balance from the Nuclear Waste Fund, which pays for the agency’s work on the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada.
In its latest update to Congress on activities related to licensing of Yucca Mountain, the NRC said its unobligated Nuclear Waste Fund balance stood at $491,635 as of Jan. 31. The agency spent $11,570 in January: $9,659 went toward planning a Feb. 27-28 meeting of the Licensing Support Network Advisory Review Panel and information collection on possible venues should the NRC resume adjudication of the Energy Department licensing application for the disposal facility; the remaining $1,911 was spent on program planning and support.
The Obama administration halted DOE and NRC licensing work for Yucca Mountain in 2010, but a federal judge in August 2013 ordered the regulator to resume the licensing process. As of January, the agency had spent $12.97 million of the $13.55 million it had available from the Nuclear Waste Fund at the time of the court ruling. Most of that money went into three projects: completion of a safety evaluation report on Yucca Mountain, loading Yucca-related documents into the NRC’s online data library, and producing a supplement to the environmental impact statement for the program.
That left the agency with $552,770 in unexpended funds in January, of which $61,135 was already obligated.
Remaining funds are expected to be used only for limited information gathering until Congress appropriates more money from the Nuclear Waste Fund, an NRC spokesman said in January. The White House requested $30 million for the NRC to resume licensing activities in fiscal 2018, which began on Oct. 1 of last year. The federal government has since then operated on a series of short-term budgets that provide nothing for Yucca Mountain. Congress has also been split on the request, with the House approving the full appropriation and Senate appropriators so far zeroing out funds for Yucca Mountain in a budget bill still awaiting a floor vote.
The NRC’s fiscal 2019 budget request seeks nearly $48 million for Yucca licensing work.
