A bipartisan group of 10 senators, led by Sen. Shelley Capito (R-WVa.), on Monday published the text of a nuclear policy bill that among other things would extend a cap on industry liability for catastrophic nuclear accidents.
The bill would extend the $13-billion liability cap known as the Price-Anderson Act by 20 years to 2045, require the Department of Energy beginning in 2025 to report annually on the U.S. nuclear-waste inventory and the associated federal financial liability, and mandate that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission asses every three years whether it is using “the most efficient metrics and schedules” to issue licenses.
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has jurisdiction over the bill, called the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act. The committee had not scheduled a hearing on the measure as of Tuesday. The bill updates and expands a nuclear infrastructure bill that Capito and bipartisan collaborators introduced in 2021 and which stalled in committee.
The new bill, like the old bill, would if passed require the Department of Energy to annually report on the amount of spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste stranded at power plants across the country, and the cost to the federal government for failing to meet its legal obligation to permanently dispose of that waste.
A report like that would centralize tallies that DOE already publishes and periodically updates. The agency tracks spent fuel and high-level waste and the government’s associated liability for failure to dispose of it, which arose from the political death of the proposed Yucca Mountain deep geologic repository in 2011.
Under a series of standard contracts with power plant operators, DOE was supposed to start taking custody of spent nuclear fuel in 1998. After that didn’t happen, many operators successfully sued DOE for a partial default of the contracts. According to the agency’s most recent count, DOE had as of Sept. 30, 2022 paid out $10 million in settlements and judgments for the government’s spent-fuel-disposal failures.
Likewise, the government’s total liability for partially defaulting on standard contracts was about $30 million as of Sept. 2022, according to the DOE’s latest agency financial report.
Counting Capito, the bill’s 10 cosponsors include five Democrats and five Republicans. They are:
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.)
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.)
Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.)
Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho)
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.)
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.)
Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho)
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)
