A bipartisan group of U.S. senators suggested Wednesday it is gearing up for another legislative campaign to authorize interim storage of the nation’s growing stockpile of nuclear waste.
Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said he hopes to meet within two weeks with panel Ranking Member Dianne Feinstei (D-Calif.), the top members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, “and we develop a plan and we move ahead.”
The intent would be to revive intact the Nuclear Waste Administration Act, which Alexander and a handful of colleagues previously introduced in 2013 and 2015, a spokesperson for Alexander said Thursday.
The legislation would, among other measures, create a new organization to lead federal management of nuclear waste and establish a program to build one or more government- or privately owned interim storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste until a permanent repository is ready. The prior iterations of the bill never made it out of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Alexander also urged Congress to decide once and for all in 2019 if it will support building the nuclear waste disposal facility under Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
“We need this year to decide what to do about Yucca Mountain. Either we’re going to build it or we’re not going to build it. We can’t just keep going on having a permanent stalemate on nuclear waste,” the Tennessee lawmaker said in his opening statement to the Senate subcommittee hearing on the Energy Department’s fiscal 2020 budget request.
In testifying before the House and Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittees this week, Perry emphasized that a permanent repository is both required by law and central to ending the decades-long impasse on disposal of what is now roughly 100,000 metric tons of radioactive waste. That includes about 80,000 metric tons of used fuel that remains stranded at nuclear power plants.
Leaving that material where it is now, spread across the country, is not acceptable, Perry told the House panel on Tuesday.
“We’ve got to find a permanent solution to this. Thirty-nine states as final repositories is not an appropriate solution,” he said in presenting the Energy Department’s latest spending plan.
In its $31.7 billion proposal for the budget year beginning Oct. 1, the Energy Department is seeking $116 million to resume licensing of the Yucca Mountain repository and to promote interim storage of spent fuel. This is the Trump administration’s third try at funding licensing at DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, respectively the applicant and adjudicator; Congress rejected requests for both fiscal 2018 and the current fiscal 2019.
“I remind the members, I remind the public, that this is the law,” Perry said Tuesday.
The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act gave the Energy Department until Jan. 31, 1998, to begin accepting spent fuel from commercial power reactors and high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations for permanent disposal. Five years later, Congress directed that the waste be placed in a geologic repository under Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
After spending nearly $20 billion to research, site, and develop a repository, the Yucca site remains unlicensed and unbuilt. The project, in total, is estimated to cost $100 billion over 100 years.
The Energy Department filed its license application with the NRC in 2008, but the Obama administration defunded the proceeding two years later. That is largely where things stand now.
Nuclear utilities paid over $20 billion into the federal fund intended to pay for disposal of their waste, and to date have gotten nothing for their money. Meanwhile, the federal government has made $8 billion in liability payouts from its judgment fund from claims filed by the utilities for DOE’s breach of the Standard Contract for disposal of their waste. That liability is costing the United States $2 million per day, Perry said.
The Energy Department’s fiscal 2020 licensing funding would be drawn from two distinct accounts, Nuclear Waste Disposal at $90 million and Defense Nuclear Waste Disposal at $26 million, “to resume regulatory activities concerning Yucca Mountain and initiate a robust interim storage program,” according to the DOE budget in brief released on March 15.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, meanwhile, is requesting $38.5 million to restart its adjudication of the DOE license application.
Nevada has battled the federal effort to make the state home to other states’ nuclear waste, filing several lawsuits and more than 200 technical contentions with the NRC against the license application. It estimates it would take up to five complete the federal license adjudication, if it resumes.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act included language on establishing “monitored retrievable storage” sites for high-level waste and spent fuel. The idea, though, has gained steam in recent years as the impasse over Yucca Mountain has dragged on.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing two applications for proposed interim spent-fuel storage facilities in Texas and New Mexico. Holtec International is seeking a 40-year license for storage of up to 173,000 metric tons of spent fuel in Lea County, N.M. An Orano-Waste Control Specialists venture has applied for a 40-year license for up to 40,000 metric tons of waste in Andrews County, Texas.
The NRC is due to finish reviewing both applications by mid-2020. However, even assuming approval, there are complications to shipping the spent fuel from nuclear power plants. To start, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act says the Energy Department can only take title to the waste for disposal when the repository is operational.
Perry referred to this language in testifying before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday.
“One of ways that we can break that logjam is to change the wording that says only the entity that can take possession of that waste is the Department of Energy, and change that to where a private entity, a private company, can take possession of that,” he said.
There have been a number of efforts in Congress in recent years to advance Yucca Mountain and interim storage, most recently Rep. John Shimkus’ (R-Ill.) Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act. None became law.
“I do think that we have got to break this impasse that we have been at for years,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said during Wednesday’s appropriations hearing.
Murkowski, along with Alexander and Feinstein, co-sponsored both earlier versions of the Nuclear Waste Administration Act.
Alexander and Feinstein have in recent years have also used their role in drafting the Senate’s first version of the appropriations bill for the DOE and NRC to press for interim storage. They argue this would expedite the Energy Department’s ability to meet its legal mandate to remove waste from the point of generation.
The Senate energy and water appropriations bill for fiscal 2019 recommended funding to “consolidate spent nuclear fuel from around the United States to one or more private or government interim central storage facilities.” That would have included as much as $10 million for DOE to contract for a privately operated storage site.
However, the Senate approach has run up against the House’s focus on funding Yucca Mountain, with the final result in the last two budgets being that neither approach received any money.
The House and Senate Appropriations committees have not yet issued any funding bills for fiscal 2020.
During Tuesday’s hearing, House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee Ranking Member Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) and member Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) both thanked Perry for again including Yucca Mountain in the funding plan.
Simpson asked the energy secretary whether local communities would be more skeptical of nearby interim-storage sites if there was reason to believe they might become permanent locations for the spent fuel.
“How willing are communities going to be to accept interim storage … if there is no likelihood of a permanent repository and they become a de facto permanent repository?” he asked.
Perry noted that in his 14 years as Texas governor he had supported Waste Control Specialists’ development of its Andrews County facility for disposal of low-level radioactive and other waste types. He said he would leave it to Texas’ current leaders to determine the state’s support for the used-fuel storage plan.
