The federal government should create a new strategy for disposing of spent nuclear fuel from power plants or recycling it, a Democratic congresswoman said in a hearing Tuesday.
“We have to find a storage solution for nuclear waste that does not abandon the communities that host nuclear reactors, whether that way is through reprocessing, permanent storage or some combination,” Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said in her opening statement at a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce energy, climate and grid security subcommittee, of which she is the ranking member.
The subcommittee on Tuesday called in the four commissioners of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to testify about the agency’s 2025 budget request, and about the agency’s plans for complying with the ADVANCE Act, a package of nuclear policy reforms passed into law this month.
Lawmakers concentrated most of their questioning on the ADVANCE Act, which passed only weeks before the hearing and which the NRC is still studying, one commissioner said.
“I think right now there’s a fair amount of digesting it,” Commissioner Annie Caputo said Tuesday. “We’ve had a memo from the general council on specific requirements [but] it’ll take some time I think to implement some of the other programs, like a review of our oversight and inspection.”
After DeGette’s opening statement, there was little talk of permanent storage for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste at Tuesday’s hearing.
NRC will eventually license a deep geologic repository for high-level waste, if the Department of Energy ever builds one, but the commission has no regulatory power that can enable consolidation of spent fuel now, at least not while the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ ban on NRC-licensed interim storage holds.
With a federal challenge to that ban pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, the highest court in the land and an independent branch of the federal government, Caputo declined to comment about the future of commission-licensed spent-fuel storage.
Christopher Hanson, the commissioner’s chair, said only that the NRC was “monitoring” DOE’s plans for spent civilian fuel.
Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), whose district includes one of the two proposed commercial interim storage sites stripped of its license by the Fifth Circuit, also waded into the issue, if briefly.
Pfluger, who opposed adding an interim spent fuel site to an existing Waste Control Specialists facility in Andrews County, said he agreed with DeGette that “we need a permanent site.”
Without saying where, Pfluger added, “I think I know where that is.”
