10. NUCLEAR

Nuclear fuel cycle

Interim storage and the Yucca Mountain repository

The United States has over 90 000 metric tonnes of nuclear waste that requires disposal. Most of this waste – 80 000 metric tonnes – consists of used fuel from the commercial nuclear fleet (US GAO, 2019). This spent nuclear fuel is enough to fill a football field about 20 metres deep. The rest, about 14 000 metric tonnes, comes from the US government’s nuclear weapons programme and includes high-level waste from chemical reprocessing of spent fuel. For the most part, all of this waste is stored where it was generated, at 80 sites in 35 states.

Providing nuclear utilities with a final repository for high-level waste (spent fuel from NPPs) is a federal responsibility under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. This Act created a tax on electricity generated by NPPs, which has accumulated into a Nuclear Waste Fund (which has a balance of more than USD 40 billion) to build a deep geological repository (DGR) (DOE, 2018). There is a wide consensus among world experts that DGRs are the most appropriate solution to dispose of nuclear waste safely and with no impacts on the environment. DGRs are being constructed or at advanced planning stages in countries such as Finland, Sweden and France. However, there is still no disposal site in the United States. The NRC received an application from the DOE on 3 June 2008, for a licence to construct the nation's first geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. In 2010, the DOE filed a request to withdraw the application, which was denied. The NRC continued to review the application but with little funding available. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals in August 2013 ordered the NRC to resume its review using existing funds from previous appropriations. The NRC completed the five-volume Safety Evaluation Report in January 2015, and also developed and published a supplement to the DOE Environmental Impact Statement, and conducted additional knowledge management activities to preserve information developed during its initial review.

Failure to provide utilities a DGR to dispose of spent nuclear fuel by the 1998 deadline set in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act is costing the administration (and US taxpayers) nearly USD 800 million per year to compensate utilities that have to store spent fuel onsite, and construct additional interim storage until a final repository is in place.

In the meantime, interim storage at NPP sites face several challenges: availability of space to store the spent fuel, the need in some cases to demonstrate that extended storage in canisters that were not designed for such long interim storage remain safe. The option of developing centralised interim storage solutions, or consolidated interim storage facilities (CISF), is therefore being seriously considered. The NRC is currently considering two proposals, one submitted in 2016 by Interim Storage Partners, LLC, for a site in Texas, and one submitted by Holtec International in 2017, to build a CISF in south-eastern New Mexico. It could eventually hold up to 120 000 metric tonnes of spent uranium fuel, storing it until a permanent repository is developed (NEI, 2019b).

In 2019, the president’s fiscal year (FY) 2020 budget request included USD 116 million for the resumption of the licence review for the repository at Yucca Mountain and for interim storage of nuclear waste. As of April 2019, Congress was still in the midst of the FY 2020 appropriations process, and had not yet directed funding for the licence application to resume.

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