A bill introduced on Capitol Hill this week by Rep. Mike Levin, D-Calif., and Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, looks to make progress in the painstaking effort to eventually remove spent nuclear fuel that has piled up over the decades at power plants across the country, including the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

The Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2024 would create a federal agency called the Nuclear Waste Administration that would manage nuclear waste issues at commercial plants. The new agency would also be in charge of finding potential places to store spent fuel on a permanent, as well as interim, basis.

Currently, the U.S. Department of Energy has those responsibilities.

If signed into law, the legislation would allow the new agency to have access to a working capital fund in the U.S. Treasury, in the hopes it would be insulated from political headwinds and fluctuations in funding levels. As envisioned, the bill would create a board to oversee the Nuclear Waste Administration and track its use of funds.

In addition, the bill gives priority to waste shipped out of shutdown nuclear reactors to any proposed interim storage facilities. That works in the favor of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which has not produced electricity since 2012 and is in the process of being dismantled.

“Years of of inaction have left nuclear waste stored in communities all across the country — including ours — and with the federal government currently spending $2 million per day for the failure to fulfill its obligation to find a real solution,” Levin said in a statement. “It’s clear that now is the time to act on bold solutions.”

Roughly 89,000 metric tons of spent fuel from assemblies have accumulated at nuclear power plants in 35 states scattered around the U.S. over the years. At San Onofre, some 3.55 million pounds (or about 1,610 metric tons) of waste is stored in dozens of canisters at the north end of the plant, known as SONGS for short.

The bill, called the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2024, was introduced Tuesday and will be assigned to the House Energy and Commerce Committee — the first of what figures to be many committee hearings and debate the legislation will have to navigate.

“My optimism is rising but I’ve been at this now for almost a decade and we keep swinging on pitches and not hitting them,” said David Victor, a UC San Diego professor who is also organizing a national working group on solving the spent fuel problem. “Now we’ve got some legislation that will help us focus. So in that sense, I’m more optimistic than I was before.”

The federal government is responsible for finding a place to store spent fuel assemblies from commercial power plants but even though the first nuclear plant in the U.S. opened in 1958, no dedicated storage federal facility has been established.

A giant underground permanent repository was near completion at Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada but the Obama administration cut off funding for the site in 2010, following years of protests from lawmakers in the Silver State who opposed it. The project’s costs came to at least $15 billion.

In recent years, there has been an effort to find locales to store the waste on an interim basis.

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm came to SONGS last year and announced the Biden administration will spend $26 million to engage communities who may be interested in accepting some of the spent fuel — a process called “consent-based siting” in which potential storage facilities are not be forced on communities but would be constructed only with approval from local governments and entities.

One potential interim site being discussed is in Andrews, Texas. A private company has lobbied to build a facility that can hold as much as 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel for up to 40 years. Pfluger represents the congressional district that includes Andrews.

In a statement, Pfluger referenced “the impasse” regarding storage sites and nuclear waste management, saying, “We cannot meet our nuclear goals without this piece of the puzzle.”

The legislation calls for using a consent-based approach at potential nuclear storage sites.

“Our bipartisan bill would empower a new single-purpose, independent federal agency to consult and collaborate with communities to chart a path forward for safely storing and disposing of our nuclear waste,” Levin said.

Executives at Southern California Edison, the utility that operates SONGS, support the legislation.

The company “views it as vital for the federal government to honor its obligation to dispose of the spent fuel,” Fred Bailly, Edison’s vice president of decommissioning and chief nuclear officer, said in an email to the Union-Tribune.

Victor said “it’s really important” the bill is bipartisan. “That’s the only way to were going to get it done in terms of legislation and in terms of holding it together politically,” he said. “Now the hard work begins.”

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