Members of a federal board on Wednesday questioned whether Department of Energy grantees could make inroads with state governments as part of the agency’s drive to find a host community for a federal interim storage site for spent nuclear fuel.
At their annual meeting, held this year in Idaho Falls and streamed online, members of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board also heard from DOE officials that some of the work done by the agency’s consortia of consent-based siting grantees may never make it into the public eye.
“State rights is unique to the USA,” board member Paul Turinsky said through an aide at the board’s annual meeting, held this year in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and webcast.
Turinsky said that “states historically have been the greatest point of resistance” to the creation of a centralized depot, interim or permanent, for the roughly 86 metric tons of irradiated nuclear fuel U.S. power plants have burned so far. He then asked DOE officials in attendance whether the agency had defined what constitutes a host community for spent nuclear fuel.
“We’re not defining the communities right now,” Natalia Saraeva, DOE’s consent-based siting team lead in the Office of Nuclear Energy, told Turinsky. “It’s up to communities to decide who they are.”
Another board member raised the possibility that DOE’s consent-based consortia might be able to bend the ears of state officials.
“Based upon your consortia groups, many of the consortia are led by state universities,” said board member Scott Tyler. “[S]o it would be possible … that those organizations would also have access to communities that are larger than individual zip codes and indeed at the state level.”
The board questioned Saraeva and her DOE consent-based siting colleague Juan Uribe after the two delivered prepared remarks about the latest incarnation of the agency’s consent-based siting plan, which the department is attempting to carry out as states have banned the storage of spent nuclear fuel in their territories and a federal appeals court has, temporarily, at least, killed the possibility of consolidating spent fuel at commercial sites.
Step one for the current consent-based siting agenda is to define what it means to consent to the storage of spent nuclear fuel. To draw up the definition, the agency has split $26 million in grant money among 13 groups.
DOE is still finalizing the cooperative agreements it awarded to consortia members, Uribe said at Tuesday’s meeting. The agency announced the awards in June. Exactly what the consortia members will produce for DOE is also to be decided, Uribe said, though it will take about two years for them to produce it, he said.
And DOE is still debating “to what extent it would make sense to make those [products] public or not because they’re still draft and preliminary,” Uribe said. The agency wants consortia members to have “frank discussions” with “more raw and unfiltered material that typically isn’t posted publicly.”
DOE is prohibited by law from building and operating a consolidated interim storage site for spent nuclear fuel before it builds a permanent repository: something the agency has no immediate plans to do because the politically pivotal battleground state of Nevada has practically made opposition to developing the congressionally authorized Yucca Mountain repository site a condition for securing the state’s electoral votes in presidential elections.
Both Joe Biden (D) and then-President Donald Trump (R) opposed Yucca in the 2020 presidential election that Biden narrowly won. As of Wednesday, a rematch appeared possible in the 2024 presidential election; Biden planned to run for reelection and Trump led the Republican primary field in national polls.
The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board is an independent federal agency that Congress formed to provide independent advice about and reviews of DOE’s nuclear waste management programs.
