A round-up of public comments on how the Department of Energy should go about siting a federal interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel should be published before Labor Day, the agency said Wednesday.
DOE “is working to analyze the comments” on its interim storage request for information (RFI) unveiled in November, an agency spokesperson told Exchange Monitor via email Wednesday. The department will publish a report of its findings “sometime this summer,” the spokesperson said.
The RFI, which aimed to collect community input on how the agency should conduct a consent-based siting process for interim storage, closed for submissions in early March and received over 200 responses, DOE has said. The agency March 25 published those comments in their entirety.
After DOE wraps up its review of the RFI responses, it is planning to next provide a competitive funding opportunity for interested communities to explore interim storage. In March, Kim Petry, then the acting deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposal, told Exchange Monitor that the funding opportunity is still in the planning phase.
Even if a willing host comes forward in the coming months, DOE has acknowledged that it can’t break ground on a potential interim storage site until federal law is changed to accommodate such a move. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act prohibits the feds from building interim storage until a permanent federal repository is operating. With the congressionally-authorized Yucca Mountain site effectively mothballed, no such facility exists.
Meanwhile, DOE in April asked Congress to approve roughly $10 million in additional funding for its interim storage inquiry for 2023, which it said it would use to fund local and tribal participation in the process.
The agency requested around $53 million in total for interim storage, which DOE again wants to bookkeep within the Office of Nuclear Energy’s Integrated Waste Management System.
Within the total would be the same $18 million Congress appropriated for the program for fiscal year 2022 under March’s omnibus budget bill, plus another $35 million. The $35 million includes the $10 million in proposed new spending for consent-based siting, plus funds that Congress, in the omnibus, placed in the Nuclear energy office’s Nuclear Waste Disposal account.
Lawmakers have refused DOE’s prior request to consolidate interim storage funding in the Integrated Waste Management System account.
