The Department of Energy expects next month to publish its key findings from a review of hundreds of public comments on its ongoing effort to site a federal interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel, an agency spokesperson said Wednesday.
DOE is “going through the formal review process” for its November request for information (RFI) aimed at collecting input on how it should go about finding a willing host community for such a site, a spokesperson told Exchange Monitor via email Wednesday. The agency expects to publish a summary of the over 200 responses it received by the end of September, the spokesperson said.
Assistant Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Energy Kathryn Huff in July told Exchange Monitor on Capitol Hill that DOE was working to publish an RFI summary “as soon as we can.”
Although November’s RFI asked the public to provide their take on an interim storage siting process, that inquiry did not ask willing host communities to come forward. DOE has said that its next step should be to offer a competitive funding opportunity for potential hosts to explore interim storage options. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm told members of Congress in May that such an award could come down in early fall.
Under current law, DOE is forbidden from actually breaking ground on an interim storage facility, even if a willing host comes forward. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) holds that the federal government cannot take title to spent nuclear fuel currently stored at power reactor sites nationwide until a permanent repository is active.
As it stands, no such site exists — the only congressionally-authorized facility for such a job, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, was put on ice after the Barack Obama administration pulled its funding in 2010.
Despite that, DOE has maintained that it is legal for the agency to do all of the prep work necessary to site federal interim storage, short of actually building the site.
The agency has acknowledged, though, that some sort of NWPA workaround will be necessary to allow a federal interim storage site to operate. A bill introduced in July by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) would establish an independent agency that would assume all of the nuclear waste management powers given to the Secretary of Energy under NWPA — a strategy that Huff has also suggested, and which has before failed to gain traction in Congress.
