Congressional check-writers should direct the Environmental Protection Agency to use its 2025 budget to update its generic standards for a nuclear waste repository, interest groups said recently.
The ask came in the form of a letter signed by twelve organizations and sent to the leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations interior and environment subcommittees on June 20. The American Nuclear Society shared the letter publicly Monday in a press release posted online.
Updating the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) generic repository standards could take five to 10 years, the groups wrote in their letter. The work should start in fiscal year 2025 with $3 million and the equivalent of two or three full-time employees at EPA, the groups said.
Updating the standard, which would give future designers a template that is not necessarily based on the failed Yucca Mountain project, “will not impact any policies related to Yucca Mountain,” the groups wrote.
EPA has said it will not update its standard unless Congress tells the agency to do so.
Yucca is legally authorized to become a repository for high-level nuclear waste but has not been developed because of presidential politics surrounding swing-state Nevada’s opposition to the project.
The groups who signed the June 20 letter are:
- American Nuclear Society
- Breakthrough Institute
- Center for Climate and Energy Solutions
- ClearPath Action
- Decommissioning Plant Coalition
- Energy Communities Alliance
- Good Energy Collective
- The Nature Conservancy
- Nuclear Innovation Alliance
- Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition
- Third Way
- U.S. Nuclear Industry Council
Some of the groups that signed last week’s letter have been arguing for a rewrite of EPA’s generic standard for some time, most recently in November.
In August, the American Nuclear Society, which said it led the letter-writing campaigns, published a report recommending that EPA make the standard for Yucca the standard for all U.S. deep-geologic repositories.
