NE TO STEER SOME R&D FUNDS TO NUKE WASTE DISPOSITION RESEARCH

摘要

The Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy is planning to take over the research and development functions previously conducted by the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management beginning in Fiscal Year 2010, NNB Monitor has learned. The shift is mainly occurring because there isn't enough money left in the paltry OCRWM budget to cover any R&D work, one DOE national lab official told NNB Monitor, and those budget numbers are only expected to slacken further as the Obama Administration prepares to shut down the Yucca Mountain repository project entirely. As a result, the NE office is directing a few million dollars of its R&D budget to waste disposition in FY2010, with the anticipation that the portion of R&D money devoted to waste issues will increase incrementally over the next few fiscal years.