The federal government must prioritize changing U.S. nuclear waste law as it eyes a spent fuel storage solution, a community stakeholders group said during a panel discussion this week.
Amending the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) is “one of the things that needs to happen” before the federal government can move forward on interim storage, Kara Colton, nuclear policy director at the Energy Communities Alliance, said during a webinar held Wednesday by the American Nuclear Society.
The group represents communities that host nuclear facilities, including federally owned ones.
That’s “a big, big lift,” Colton said, and it’s something industry has not discussed in depth, “but it’s, in fact, one of the most important things that has to happen.”
As it stands, NWPA precludes the Department of Energy from taking title to spent nuclear fuel from power plants until a permanent repository exists. There’s currently no such site operating in the U.S. — the only location congressionally-authorized as a repository, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, remains dead in the water after the Joe Biden administration refused to fund the project for anything more than guns, guards and gates in 2022.
DOE currently foots the bill for nuclear power operators to manage the over 80,000 tons of spent fuel stranded at plants across the country.
When it comes to actually getting Congress to sign onto a NWPA amendment, the former head of DOE’s Office of Civilian Nuclear Waste Management, Lake Barrett, said at Wednesday’s webinar that talking generally about updating the law “doesn’t do much good.”
“I think you have to have a proposal from a community that says ‘under these conditions, I’m willing to do [interim storage],’” Barrett said. “I think if a plausible, realistic case is taken to Congress, I think they will accept and support that, because we all need a solution to this.”
DOE has already acknowledged that it currently can’t build a federal interim storage site without some sort of NWPA update. However, the Biden administration’s pick to head the Office of Nuclear Energy, Kathryn Huff, told RadWaste Monitor after her Senate confirmation hearing last week that Congress could stand up “a TVA-like authority” to manage interim storage — an end-run around existing law also suggested by the 2012 Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.
