The country’s top nuclear energy innovator assured local industry and Connecticut government representatives Tuesday that her office has reinvigorated its search for a storage solution for spent nuclear fuel, a daunting issue that threatens the state and country’s near term energy goals.

KathrynHuff, who leads the U.S. Department of Energy’s office of nuclear energy, told a group of industry stakeholders in Waterford that achieving aggressive state and federal green energy and carbon elimination goals is dependent on deployment of a new generation of smaller, safer and more efficient reactors. But she said new or even continuing nuclear generation is jeopardized by the government’s inability to locate national repositories for highly radioactive spent fuel.

While continuing its search for a permanent storage site, Huff said her office has jump-started a search for one or more interim storage sites, something she said is needed to win public support for the industry by demonstrating radioactive waste won’t continue to accumulate at sites scattered around the country.

She said the Biden administration views nuclear-generated electricity as “critical” to achieving U.S. goals of substantially reducing carbon emissions by 2030, producing zero carbon electricity by 2035 and achieving a “net zero carbon economy” by 2050. So-called renewable green energy sources such as wind and solar cannot fill national energy needs, she said.

“These goals are extremely aggressive and it can’t be done without nuclear power that is resilient and reliable,” she said. “We have to keep existing nuclear power plants open and build new advanced reactors. In order to reach those goals, we have to secure and sustain a nuclear fuel cycle that makes sense for us in this century. We have a lot of spent fuel waiting for a destination.”

Huff was participating in a round table discussion organized by U.S. Rep Joe Courtney, D-2, for stake-holders in the state’s nuclear-savvy southeast corner, home to much of the U.S. Navy’s nuclear submarine fleet in Groton, Dominion Energy’s active Millstone nuclear complex in Waterford and the decommissioned and deconstructed Connecticut Yankee nuclear plant on Haddam Neck on the lower Connecticut River.

The Navy will not discuss what it does with its spent reactor fuel, but it is exempt from the federal regulations that prohibit off-site removal from active and decommissioned commercial plants like Millstone and Connecticut Yankee.

Millstone has years of storage space left, but Dominion has said the space required for on-site storage limits its ability to achieve on-site development of new, so-called green energy solutions or a small, new generation reactor. The operators of Connecticut Yankee have removed all traces of its plant from their spectacular, 544-acre, river-front site, but are prohibited by the federal government from admitting the public or donating the undeveloped land as a nature preserve because the federal government has not identified a place to relocate spent fuel stored there in massive, impermeable casks.

Under an agreement with the nuclear industry, the federal government is obligated to pay for spent fuel storage costs in Connecticut and elsewhere, at what Huff said has been a rate of about $1 billion a year over the last decade.

There was consensus among those at the round table that public opinion has shifted in favor of nuclear power over the last decade — moved in part they said by a growing realization that carbon reduction rates and a reduced rate of climate change are probably unreachable without it.

“It feels different today,” said Courtney, who is a leader of the Congressional spent fuel caucus, 104 U.S. House members with retired or active nuclear power plants in their districts.

Regardless of the shift, Huff said interim and permanent storage and disposal plans are needed to win support for the expanded nuclear energy production needed to make a dent in climate change.

As an example, state Sen. Norm Needleman, an Essex Democrat who attended the Waterford meeting and who chairs the legislature’s energy committee, said the legislature has lifted a decades-old moratorium on nuclear power expansion in the state, part of a strategy to promote carbon reduction.

But he said, the expansion is restricted to the Millstone site. And he said sentiment access the Legislature and state regulators is that expansion will not take place until the federal government achieves a storage solution.

Huff said her office has received about 220 replies to a request for information about a possible interim storage site that it distributed late last year to governments and other entities with potential interest is hosting or studying sites. The department has refused to discuss what interest, if any, it received from the survey.

But the government is committing money to the program. Country said three significant spending initiatives in Congress this year — including the Inflation Reduction Act — have included money to study nuclear power expansion.

Huff said the office has extended a deadline until the end of January for applicants who want part of a $16 million grant to study potential interim storage sites. She said the interim sites will close once a permanent geologic site is located and opened.

Congress began searching in 1982 for a permanent, geologically secure, underground site to serve as a national repository for nuclear waste when it passed Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The law required development of a repository by 1998 and the federal government chose Yucca Mountain, in a national security zone about 90 miles north of Las Vegas.

But, in spite of millions of dollars of investment, the Yucca repository bogged down in arguments over safety. President Barack Obama suspended the development license in 2010, President Donald J. Trump waffled on the question and President Joseph P. Biden has said he won’t let the project move forward. Private, interim storage facilities proposed in Texas and New Mexico also have been blocked by political opposition.

In the meantime, as much as 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel continues to pile up and remain stranded at what were supposed to have been temporary sites around the country.

There are 43 enormous concrete and steel storage casks containing radioactive material under guard at the former Connecticut Yankee plant. At the Millstone site, waste is divided between a storage pool and 47 storage modules. Dominion has the capacity to store a total of 135 modules.

Huff said the government has failed to find interim or permanent storage sites because it has not tried to win grassroots support. The new approach employs social scientists, as well as financial and other incentives to win local “consent.” She said the approach is based on successful programs in Finland, Sweden and Canada.

“We are focused not only on having a supply of fresh fuel, but that we sustain the back end by responsibly managing that spent nuclear fuel,” Huff said. “So we have restarted a process to use consent to find a location or more than one location for that spent nuclear fuel, which would allow us to take possession of the fuel at places like Connecticut Yankee, where there is no longer a reactor.”