Senate panel told it must rewrite the nuclear waste law before disposal sites can proceed

Electricity customers have paid more than $51 billion into a federal fund meant to pay for permanent disposal of the country's nuclear waste. At a Senate hearing Wednesday, the chair running it suggested the money is not there.

"It's probably already been spent in some form or fashion," Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said, "because it hasn't been spent on what it was properly designated for." Lake Barrett, who once ran the Energy Department's nuclear waste program, agreed: "The federal IOUs are sitting there in the Treasury," and turning them into cash is Congress's problem to solve.

Alaska has a seat at that table. Sen. Dan Sullivan holds it and did not speak Wednesday, while senators from Utah, Wyoming, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio and Massachusetts spent their time asking what the program would mean at home.

The Environment and Public Works Committee met to consider rewriting the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which currently allows only Yucca Mountain to be considered as a repository. Nothing the Energy Department is now proposing can proceed until that changes.

What it is proposing is a set of Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses, where a host state takes a share of the nation's waste in exchange for the jobs and industry that come with the whole nuclear fuel cycle. Six states have signed preliminary agreements, including Capito's West Virginia.

Utah is one of them, and Sen. John Curtis described his state's participation as exploratory. His worry was specific: that Utah agrees to a pilot and ends up "holding the bag" on permanent storage with none of the promised economic development.

Sen. Ed Markey put the same concern more bluntly. Interim storage, he said, becomes permanent by default, and "those sites are never going anywhere." He also said the administration has fired members of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, fired the chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and sent the Justice Department into the commission's headquarters, and argued no host community will trust a program whose safety regulator is not independent.

Barrett was one of those fired. A Republican appointed to the review board by President Biden, he said he was removed on the first full day of the Trump administration, and said he retains confidence in the federal safety system regardless.

The cost of doing nothing keeps running. About 90,000 metric tons of used fuel sits at roughly 70 sites across 35 states. The government was legally obligated to begin taking it in 1998 and never has, and taxpayers now pay roughly $2 million a day in damages, with accumulated liability approaching $60 billion.