The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in August spent $5,892 from its remaining Nuclear Waste Fund balance, with some of it going to legal costs in a petition against one of the commissioners.
The agency after that spending had $443,310 remaining in unexpended, unobligated money from the fund intended to pay for development of the planned Yucca Mountain radioactive waste repository in Nevada. That includes the NRC review of the Department of Energy license application for the underground facility.
Congress in 1987 designated Yucca Mountain as the ultimate disposal site for high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations and spent reactor fuel from the nation’s commercial nuclear power plants. The Department of Energy submitted its license application to the NRC in 2008. The Obama administration halted all work on the project in 2010, but a federal appeals court in August 2013 ordered the NRC to proceed with the licensing process.
At the time the nuclear industry regulator had over $13.5 million in its balance from the fund. More than $8.3 million was subsequently spent on completing a safety evaluation report for the DOE license application, along with nearly $1.6 million on a supplement to the environmental impact statement.
In August, the agency spent $1,448 on federal court litigation. That month, the state of Nevada filed a petition asking the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit to prohibit NRC Commissioner David Wright from participating in any decision on Yucca Mountain. The state government says Wright, an energy consultant who joined the commission on May 30, has proven himself to be unfairly biased in favor of the repository. Wright denied the contention in rejecting the state’s direct request for recusal over the summer.
The commission’s Nuclear Waste Fund update does not indicate how much of the legal spending in August was directly connected to the Wright case. It says only that NRC “attorneys have provided legal support in connection with this petition.”
The agency this week did not respond to requests for additional information on the matter. While a number of documents were filed with the court as recently as Oct. 1, Wright and the NRC have not submitted a formal response to the Nevada petition.
The NRC in August also spent $593 from the fund on program planning and support and $3,851 on a February meeting of the Licensing Support Network Advisory Review Panel and data collection for possible venues for hearings in the adjudication of the Yucca Mountain license application.
Adjudication would resume only with additional congressional appropriations for the NRC from the Nuclear Waste Fund. The current budgets for the NRC and DOE, through Sept. 30, 2019, include no money for Yucca Mountain licensing activities.
