Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
3/27/2015
With the Department of Energy announcing this week that it plans to take “affirmative steps” to siting a consent-based pilot interim storage facility, questions still remain over how best to measure consensus. DOE is still working out its process to siting a facility, but according to a panel held last week at the 2015 Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix, the process of consent should not be dictated by the federal government. “You don’t dictate what consent-based siting means, but rather you respect the decisions that are made at each level,” said Monty Humble, Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative co-owner. “For example, a county government might have one method of determining what the local population consents to, and a state might have a different way. I think it would be a tragic mistake for the federal government to dictate top down what consent-based means. It should be decided on the local level up.”
A consent-based pilot consolidated storage facility is DOE’s preferred strategy to satisfy the nation’s spent fuel disposal needs. In 2010, the Obama Administration shuttered the Yucca Mountain project, saying the project was ‘unworkable,’ mainly due to the lack of consent from Nevada. While a few communities have expressed initial interest in potentially hosting a facility, only one, Andrews County in Texas, has officially backed a facility through a county council resolution, although the state still has not passed an official indication of consent yet.
There is not one exact formula for measuring consent, and according to Jim Hamilton, founder and president of the National Spent Fuel Collaborative, a non-profit aimed at helping the consent-based process work, you know it when you see it. Measuring what you see, though, still seems to be the question DOE needs to answer. “A fair question for the federal government to ask is: Has the state, counties, and local governments made binding commitments to support the construction of a facility?” Humble said.
Need to Start Locally, Build Up to State Level, Local Official Says
According to John Heaton, chairman of the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance, those binding agreements must begin at the local stage, and then build up to the state. “If you are looking for a measurement, then you have to work through the process,” Heaton said. “You need to get consent from the communities, whether it’s resolutions from city councils or county commissions that speak for the public. They’re the one who put their necks on the line in the next election if you will. Then you have to work up through the legislature and the governor, and I think the real measurement there is either a piece of legislation passed by the legislature and subsequent signing from the governor, or the governor, themselves, getting into a contract with DOE.”
While difficulties still remain, supporters of Yucca Mountain have been trying to use the bottom up approach to resurrect the shuttered project. A resolution passed by Nye County and nine other surrounding counties has endorsed the idea of hosting the geologic repository, despite the state of Nevada’s staunch stance against the project. According to Darrel Lacy, the director of Nye County’s Nuclear Waste Repository Project Office, the spread of the resolution seems to have soften the oppositions stance on Yucca Mountain. “By getting the additional counties to put in on this, it seems to have received some softening of the opposition form the political forces in the state,” Lacy said.
