The Obama Administration has put the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) on hold until further notice. GNEP, an international initiative that began in 2006 under the Bush Administration, was designed to promote nuclear waste reprocessing. As TCS has previously reported, GNEP was an expensive proposal and unnecessary burden to taxpayers. Within a year of GNEP’s announcement, the National Academy of Sciences was calling for its end.
In 2008, the House Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development explicitly denied any funding for GNEP, saying that they would not give money to a “counterproductive, poorly designed, and poorly executed” program. And this year, the House and Senate echoed the President’s budget request in their Energy and Water Appropriations Bills (see the House version here and the Senate version here) zeroing out funds for program.
Last month, the Administration put the final nail in the coffin with the termination of GNEP’s environmental impact statement. On June 29, the Department of Energy (DOE) released a statement announcing the cancellation of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS). The cancellation of the PEIS came with the decision that the department is no longer “pursuing domestic commercial reprocessing.”
TCS is pleased with this decision and will continue to monitor funding for nuclear waste reprocessing initiatives.
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