Waste Control Specialists has filed its last updates with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to the company’s license application to build and operate an interim storage site for spent nuclear fuel, CEO Rod Baltzer said Wednesday.
That wraps up the Dallas-based company’s responses to the regulator’s request for additional information to the application filed last April, Baltzer said in a blog update.
The NRC is also moving expeditiously, according to the CEO. It is establishing the scope of the environmental impact statement for the project, and is taking public comment on the planned document through April 28. The fourth public hearing on the EIS is scheduled for April 6 at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md.
Waste Control Specialists plans by 2021 to build a West Texas facility with the capacity to store 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel now held on-site at nuclear power plants around the nation. Holtec International is scheduled on Friday to submit its own license application, for a facility designed to hold 120,000 metric tons of waste in southeastern New Mexico.
If approved, the sites would store the stockpile of spent fuel — now at roughly 75,000 metric tons and growing by about 2,000 tons per year — until the Department of Energy fulfills its legal mandate to build a permanent repository for the waste.
The Trump administration’s preliminary fiscal 2018 budget proposal would provide $120 million for interim storage and resuming licensing of the Yucca Mountain commercial-defense waste repository in Nevada. If Congress agrees, this would represent an about-face from the Obama administration’s plan for separate storage sites for defense and civil waste.
“It’s been five years since the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future presented its report to DOE in January of 2012 recommending the consolidation of spent nuclear fuel at an interim storage facility. Those recommendations are still valid and the need for a solution grows more urgent with the passage of time,” Baltzer wrote.
