The interested public has just about one week left to suggest ways the Department of Energy could go about siting a future federal interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel.
March 4 is the deadline for submitting comments on DOE’s request for information (RFI) about the interim storage inquiry the agency unveiled in November. DOE wants input about what the process should look like but is not yet looking for volunteers to host such a site.
Even so, DOE isn’t “ruling anything out,” where potential host sites are concerned, Kim Petry, acting deputy assistant secretary of spent fuel and waste disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy, said during a San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station community panel Feb. 10.
The current RFI should help the agency “figure out how to do this in the most effective way that is the most inclusive and responsive to all the communities in the United States who may be interested in hosting,” Petry said.
As the deadline approaches, comments are rolling in. Kathryn Huff, one-time acting assistant secretary for nuclear energy and the Joe Biden administration’s pick to fill that role permanently, said Jan. 12 that responses so far have been “creative.”
Even if a federal interim storage facility gets past the planning phase, there are still some legal roadblocks that DOE has said it needs to clear before the project can break ground.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) currently prohibits the feds from building interim storage until a permanent repository is operating — and the only congressionally-authorized site for such a task, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, has been effectively dead for about a decade now. Huff told Exchange Monitor in November that that part of NWPA will “need to be addressed” before a federal interim storage project could move forward.
