Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
5/30/2014
The Bipartisan Policy Center announced this week the makeup of an advisory council for its efforts to address the nation’s high-level nuclear waste problem. Among the council’s 13 members are industry representatives, former regulatory officials and former members of Congress. “These are well-informed people that have had experience on the nuclear side, and the key to this is that inside these 13 people, there is a fairly broad view of nuclear power,” said Tim Frazier, who is leading the BPC’s efforts. “There is a diverse view of where we think ought to go and what we need to do. We tried to be fairly balanced. It’s such a diverse group on the advisory council that their interests are varied from one to the other.”
The advisory council consists of:
—Vicky Bailey, former member of the BRC and a former member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission;
— Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council;
— David Blee, executive director of the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council;
— Peter Bradford, former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission;
— Norm Dicks, former U.S. Representative of Washington’s 6th Congressional District;
— Alex Flint, senior vice president of governmental affairs at the Nuclear Energy Institute;
— Dennis Hastert, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives;
— Dick Kelly, former chairman and chief executive officer of Xcel Energy;
— Richard Meserve, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission;
— Jim Nussle, former director of the Office of Management and Budget and former chairman of the House Committee on the Budget;
— Phil Sharp, a former member of the BRC;
— Ted Strickland, former governor of Ohio; and
— David Wright, former president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.
Project Identifying Barriers
The BPC’s project, named “America’s Nuclear Future: Taking Action to Address Nuclear Waste,” aims to expand the conversation on implementable nuclear waste solutions to a more national and regional audience. The campaign will conduct events, workshops, issue briefs, educational materials, and policy options in an attempt to identify barriers and solutions to those barriers to getting a workable solution. There are four scheduled regional meetings that will take place in the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest and West. The first of these meetings will take place on June 10 in Boston at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
According to Frazier, the meetings will have two sessions: a morning session that is invite-only and an afternoon session open to the public. The morning session will identify barriers and possible solutions to those barriers from the perspective of the invited participants, and the afternoon session will include a panel to summarize some of the topics identified in the morning along with a question and answer session to give the public a chance to speak, Frazier said. “What we are trying to do is have a real good round table discussion that is going to focus on the barriers to move forward and to find out what is stopping us from moving forward on nuclear waste,” Frazier said. “Then we are going to have a discussion in this morning session about what we can do to help break the barriers down. If not remove them, then what can we do to lower them enough so we can get over them and move forward to take some actions to address the nuclear waste.”
Frazier added on the afternoon session, “It’s an opportunity to get the public involved by letting them interact with the panelists and talk about the barriers, and see if they might have a question or two that might lead us to identify an additional barrier. We are hoping to glean from that what some of the barriers are to the people in the Northeast.”
