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A committee of the advisory panel monitoring the decommissioning of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant held a meeting this week to get an update on federal nuclear waste policy and the potential ramifications for the Vermont plant.
On January 11th, 2019 Entergy completed its sale of the Vernon facility to NorthStar Nuclear Decommissioning Company. The Vermont Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel created its Federal Nuclear Waste Policy Committee in December 2020 to keep track of federal spent fuel and disposal issues and create recommendations for the full panel. At a meeting Monday U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy, Office of Integrated Waste Management Program Manager Erica Bickford provided background on federal nuclear waste policy and plans. “We have received direction from the incoming administration to resume work on consent based siting, essentially to pick up where things left off at the end of 2016 and very early 2017. And this approach this time is supported by Congress. So in Fiscal Year ’21 appropriations Congress directed the department to conduct interim storage activities consistent with the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 and to move forward under existing authority to identify a site for a federal interim storage facility. So this is significant because it’s the first in ten years that Congress has provided specific direction to DOE to move forward on a specific facility for spent nuclear fuel.”