By John Stang
A Thursday hearing of a U.S. Senate committee focused on a perceived symbiosis between the long-delayed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository and two proposed consolidated used fuel storage sites in Texas and New Mexico.
Senators and witnesses argued that a permanent disposal facility in Nevada needs to be actively in motion to prevent the “interim” storage sites from becoming permanent. That latter possibility could make the temporary storage operations unpalatable to their intended home states, according to speakers on both sides of the dais.
The formal reason for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing was to discuss the 2019 version of the Nuclear Waste Administration Act, filed at the end of April by panel Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). But the discussion spread out to address the decades-long impasse over disposal of the nation’s growing stockpile of radioactive waste.
“We have come to discuss an issue to which we reached a stalemate for quite some time,” Murkowski said in her opening remarks.
“The federal government is approaching a decade of inexcusable inaction in this area,” said Steven Nesbit, a former Duke Energy executive currently serving as chairman of the American Nuclear Society’s Public Policy Division.
Congress in 1982 gave the Department of Energy until Jan. 31, 1998, to begin disposal of the nation’s high-level waste from defense nuclear operations and spent reactor fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. Five years later it directed that the material be buried under federal land in the Nevada desert, roughly 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Today there is a growing stockpile of roughly 100,000 metric tons of material spread around the country. The federal government has already paid more than $7 billion to nuclear plant owners for failing to meet its legal mandate to take their radioactive waste. That is on top of the $15 billion spent to determine whether the Yucca Mountain site is safe for a repository.
The Energy Department’s 2008 license application with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission stalled after the Obama administration defunded the proceeding in 2010. Congress rejected the Trump administration’s first two requests for appropriations to resume licensing. Nonetheless, the White House is seeking about $150 million for the work at the two agencies in fiscal 2020.
As they have in recent years, members of Congress in 2019 have filed bills they hope will push forward some plan for waste disposal. Several of the bills, including Murkowski’s, are lightly revised versions of legislation from prior Congresses.
The Nuclear Waste Administration Act was filed in 2013 and 2015, dying in committee both times. Among its measures, the 2019 bill would: establish a new federal organization responsible for siting, licensing, building, and operating waste facilities; direct construction of a pilot storage facility for priority waste, at least one storage site for nonpriority waste, and at least one permanent repository for the waste; require that communities determine “whether, and on what terms” they will accept a waste site; and create a five-person Nuclear Waste Oversight Board that would manage funding for the projects in two separate accounts.
Committee Ranking Member Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said — without elaborating — that the current draft will need some changes before it can get through the Senate. In conversation with Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Manchin committed that community assent must be part of the selection process for any waste site.
Manchin wondered whether spent reactor fuel could be recycled instead of sent to fuel storage sites, as done in Japan and France. This recycling has been banned since the 1970s in the United States because of fears it could produce nuclear weapons material. Nesbit said uranium is cheap and easy to obtain — cheaper than reprocessing fuel.
Alexander contended that, with Yucca Mountain in extended limbo, consolidated interim storage must be considered as a stopgap measure to deal with the nation’s growing stockpile of used nuclear fuel.
As chairman of the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, Alexander in recent years has pressed to fund interim storage to expedite the removal of spent fuel from power plants. But that ran into the Republican-led House’s demand that funding for that program accompany money to license Yucca Mountain. That standoff has meant no funding for either approach.
“People are saying because you can’t do Yucca Mountain, you can’t do anything else. If we cannot do Yucca Mountain, should we drop doing everything else?” said Alexander, who in recent months has called for an up-or-down vote on whether to restart Yucca Mountain.
Alexander might have an opening after Democrats retook the House majority in the November 2018 midterm elections. The House multi-agency appropriations bill, passed last week with funding for DOE and the NRC, zeroes out Yucca Mountain favor of $47.5 million for integrated management of nuclear waste. That would include $25 million for consolidated interim storage.
Two corporate teams are waiting on NRC licenses for their planned storage facilities.
Holtec International is seeking a 40-year license initially covering storage of 8,680 metric tons of spent fuel in Lea County, N.M. With additional regulatory approval, storage could ultimately exceed 100,000 metric tons up to 120 years.
An Orano-Waste Control Specialists team, under the title Interim Storage Partners, is seeking a 40-year license initially covering 5,000 metric tons. The facility would be built on the 14,900-acre WCS waste disposal complex and would have a maximum capacity of 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel.
The two most discussed topics were that Yucca Mountain’s repository is needed as a viable ultimate destination for the wastes headed to the interim sites, and the need for the host states and communities to determine the legally enforceable terms under which they would accept the wastes.
“Everyone is concerned that interim will become de facto permanent” in the absence of a permanent repository, Murkowski said.
“What happens if a permanent site is never built?” said Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.).
Heinrich advocated for the current plank in the bill that allows local and state governments to set enforceable conditions for any consolidated storage site. “I’ve heard local and state control referred to as politics,” he said.
“Politics are the expressions of the public,” said Sen. Angus King (I-Maine).
