Nuclear Waste

DOE Should Provide More Information on Monitored Retrievable Storage Gao ID: RCED-87-92 June 1, 1987

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO evaluated the Department of Energy's (DOE) plans for monitored retrievable storage (MRS) of spent nuclear fuel, focusing on whether the DOE MRS proposal provided Congress with enough information to determine whether to authorize an MRS facility.

GAO found that: (1) DOE proposed an MRS system whose principal role would be waste preparation rather than long-term waste storage, as the Nuclear Waste Policy Act envisioned; (2) the DOE proposal did not show how a system that included MRS would differ from a system that did not; (3) DOE did not analyze potential alternatives to determine whether it could improve the nuclear waste management process without MRS; (4) DOE did not compare the costs of MRS and non-MRS alternatives; (5) DOE believes that, while MRS would increase total system costs by $1.5 billion to $1.6 billion, it would offset the costs by savings of up to $1 billion in spent-fuel storage costs at reactors; and (6) DOE did not estimate the cost of state and local taxes for MRS or the cost of mitigating the local impact of an MRS facility.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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