The Nuclear Waste Administration Act is all set and ready to go for this session of Congress, the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee said Thursday in a hearing — it just hasn’t been filed yet.
“We have a text ready to go,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WVa.) said during the hearing, in which DOE’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy, Kathryn Huff, testified. Manchin has introduced the bill before. It died on the vine in the 117th session of Congress that ended in January. The measure would create a separate government agency to deal with civilian nuclear waste, carving the responsibility out of DOE. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) introduced a similar bill in 2019, during the 116th Congress. It died without a floor vote.
Taking nuclear waste out of DOE “is a constant topic of conversation internal to my office,” Huff testified at the hearing.
Butte County, Idaho sued Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in federal court this week over continued spent nuclear fuel storage at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory.
The county says DOE should bear the “social” and “economic” costs of the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) serving as a “default repository” for nuclear waste from entities such as the U.S. Navy and a commercial nuclear plant in Pennsylvania where a partial-reactor meltdown occurred.
Until DOE catalogs the impacts, INL should not receive any more shipments of Naval spent fuel and there should be no more license extensions for the Three-Mile Island-2 spent fuel pad at the laboratory, according to the complaint. A DOE spokesperson declined comment, directing inquiries to the Department of Justice.
It’s too soon to tell when the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Ōkuma, Fukushima, Japan, destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, might be decommissioned, the top official at the plant told the Associated Press last week.
“Going forward, we have to face unconceivably difficult work such as retrieving the melted debris” from inside the reactors, Akira Ono, plant head and president of Fukushima Daiichi Decontamination & Decommissioning Engineering Co., told AP.
