House Subcommittee hearing examines issues with spent nuclear fuel storage

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s Interior, Energy and Environment Subcommittee recently held a hearing on issues regarding spent nuclear fuel storage and the federal government’s inaction to meet statutory obligations to manage them.

In testimony, Anthony O’Donnell, chairman of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARC), noted that since the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 was signed into law, state regulators have agreed that nuclear electricity users would pay for the federal government to manage and dispose of nuclear wastes from nuclear power plants.

He continued, stating that consumers have paid five different times for nuclear waste disposal services since the federal government missed its first statutory deadline in 1998.

In total, consumers have paid approximately $40 billion into the Nuclear Waste Fund with accrued interest, which generates $1.7 billion in interest for the fund annually.

O’Donnell said that ratepayers paid a third time to consolidate storage racks in the storage pools, a fourth time for dry cask storage at reactor sites, and a fifth time through taxes paid for relay-related partial breach-of-contract damages disbursed from the Justice Department’s Judgment Fund.

Prior to the launch of the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository, O’Donnell noted that NARUC would be in favor of using interim storage sites to deal with the spent nuclear fuel.

Chuck Smith, chairman of the Energy Communities Alliance (ECA), said that more than 90 million gallons of radioactive wastes resulting from reprocessing activities are stored in 332 underground tanks at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Hanford site in Washington state, the Idaho National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site in North Carolina.

While all waste is eventually designated for Yucca Mountain, he said, some of it has been vitrified in preparation for transportation to the repository and the ECA supported moving forward with the Yucca Mountain program.

Smith noted in the absence of movement on the Yucca Mountain program the ECA recommended an alternative approach that would involve reclassifying some defense wastes from its current high-level waste designation so that it could be managed by the DOE as transuranic waste and dispositioned at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico or a number of private facilities.

According to the Nuclear Energy Initiative, the hearing is expected to help support provisions of the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017, which is expected to receive considering on the House floor before the end of 2017.