WASHINGTON, DC - House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) and Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) today wrote to Department of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz regarding the president’s recent determination that a separate repository is required for the disposal of high-level defense waste.
The committee leaders wrote, “This latest determination is a significant change from the bipartisan, 30 year nuclear waste management policy in which both defense waste and commercial spent nuclear fuel are jointly disposed in a permanent repository located at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
“The determination is based on an analysis of six factors identified in the NWPA: cost efficiency, health and safety, regulation, transportation, public acceptability, and national security. The administration’s reassessment of these factors is based on underlying assumptions that appear to disregard the existing work that has been accomplished to date on a permanent repository."
The leaders posed a series of questions to DOE to help provide a greater understating of the determination to split defense and commercial waste disposal, and are seeking answers by April 28, 2015.
