The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in December spent $9,999 of its remaining balance from the Nuclear Waste Fund, leaving just under $514,000 for work on licensing the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, according to the agency’s latest update to Congress.
Three years after the Obama administration halted work on Yucca Mountain, a federal court in August 2013 ordered the NRC to resume the licensing process for the planned Department of Energy underground site for disposal of spent nuclear reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste.
The NRC had $13.5 million available from the Nuclear Waste Fund at the time of the court ruling, and has since spent over $12.9 million. Nearly $11.5 million was spent on 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 project.
In December, the NRC spent $8,079 on information gathering for a site that could be used for the agency’s adjudication of the Yucca Mountain license application, if that is resumed, along with planning a virtual meeting of the Licensing Support Network Advisory Review Panel (LSNARP).
The panel is now scheduled to meet on Feb. 27-28 to discuss options for reconstituting the Licensing Support Network, the digital trove of Yucca documents that was retired when the NRC halted its licensing activities.
The remaining $1,920 in December expenditures went toward program planning and support.
That left $564,340 in the NRC’s Nuclear Waste Fund balance. Of that, $50,508 is already committed, leaving a total unobligated balance of $513,832.
The NRC requested $30 million from the Nuclear Waste Fund for fiscal 2018 to resume the licensing process for Yucca Mountain. Congress has yet to approve the request, much less a full budget for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, 2017. The stopgap measures that have kept the federal government running for more than four months have included no money for Yucca Mountain.
