Happy Friday, nuke-watchers. Your RadWaste Monitor reporter was on the red-eye back from Phoenix after the first in-person Waste Management Symposia in two years. Here are some other stories from across the civilian nuclear space that we were tracking this week.
DOE to award $36M for advanced nuclear waste research
The Department of Energy will dole out millions in federal cash to nearly a dozen research programs aiming to reduce the amount of nuclear waste from advanced reactors, the agency announced this week.
DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) unveiled around $36 million in funding to “projects seeking to increase the deployment, and use of, nuclear power as a reliable source of clean energy and limit the amount of waste produced” by advanced reactors, according to a Thursday press release.
The recipients, funded through ARPA-E’s Optimizing Nuclear Waste and Advanced Reactor Disposal Systems (ONWARDS) program, will work on a variety of projects aimed at addressing the back-end challenges of advanced nuclear fuel cycles, the press release said.
Among the 11 awardees are nuclear waste services company Deep Isolation, which is getting around $3.6 million to work on a canister system for “minimizing the long-run costs of used fuel and waste management,” and advanced nuclear company Oklo, which will research a state-of-the-art used nuclear fuel recycling facility to the tune of a roughly $4 million federal grant, DOE said.
The ONWARDS program was unveiled last year as “a program created to identify and facilitate technologies” for advanced reactor spent fuel and waste, the press release said.
CT lawmaker proposes rolling back nuclear ban at Millstone plant
Following an emerging pattern in state nuclear policy, a bill in Connecticut’s House of Representatives unveiled recently aims to partially walk back a state ban on new nuclear power to allow a reactor to be built at an existing plant in the Constitution State.
The bill, proposed in February by state Rep. Holly Cheeseman (R), would alter Connecticut’s 1978 moratorium on nuclear power to exempt “any nuclear power generating facility operating in the state as of October 1, 2022.” Current law bars any new reactor construction in the state until the federal government “has identified and approved a demonstrable technology or means for the disposal of high level nuclear waste.”
As of Friday, the bill had yet to hear debate in the state House Energy and Technology Committee.
There’s currently just one operational nuclear plant in Connecticut — Dominion’s Millstone plant, a three-unit site in Waterford, Conn. A fourth reactor located at the Connecticut Yankee plant in Haddam Neck, Conn., was decommissioned in 2004.
This move comes just after West Virginia repealed its own nuclear ban in February. Montana lifted its restrictions on new reactors in 2021.
NRC accepting hearing requests for Humboldt Bay post-decommissioning license updates
Members of the public have until May 9 to request a hearing on some final administrative changes to a recently-decommissioned nuclear power plant’s license, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said this week.
According to a Federal Register notice published Tuesday, NRC is reviewing some proposed license changes for Humboldt Bay Power Plant’s independent spent fuel storage installation (ISFSI) that would remove technical specifications related to the plant itself, which the commission deemed safe for unrestricted use in November. The Eureka, Calif., plant’s operator Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) finished the decommissioning process in October.
PG&E has said that Humboldt’s spent fuel inventory will remain onsite at the ISFSI which holds 390 spent fuel assemblies. The storage site got a 40-year license extension from NRC in May 2020.
The company is also preparing plans to dismantle California’s Diablo Canyon plant, whose federal operating license expires in 2025. Details on how that work will get done, which PG&E said in November it would soon share, are still forthcoming.
