WASHINGTON — The United States still needs to find an isolated location to bury its nuclear waste, just not below Yucca Mountain in Nevada, former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko said Thursday.
“The concept has always been bury it and forget. That’s the idea, that you could find a place where you could isolate the waste and not have to do any institutional control or management of the waste,” Jaczko said. He added: “I think still long term the best solution is finding a place where you can isolate the waste for a long period of time. But you need to have political buy-in to do that.”
Nevada’s leaders have long battled federal plans to make their state home to other states’ radioactive waste – a point new Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) reaffirmed in his first State of the State address on Wednesday: “Not on my watch.”
Political buy-in on disposal will be hard to find, Jaczko said, suggesting the nation’s stockpile of spent nuclear fuel is likely to remain in storage at the commercial nuclear power plants where it was generated.
That would represent a further breach of federal law: Congress in 1982 ordered the Department of Energy to by Jan. 31, 1998, begin removing spent fuel from the points of origin. More than two decades past the deadline, the department has not relocated any of what is now roughly 80,000 metric tons of radioactive waste.
Even as the NRC considers two license applications for shorter-term holding sites for spent fuel, Jaczko also cast doubt on the future of consolidated interim storage. He acknowledged his opposition to this approach — Moving the used fuel around the country just once will be “a tremendously big undertaking. It’s not something I could envision people doing multiple times.”
Jaczko spoke to reporters here at the offices of the Nuclear Resources Defense Council as a former nuclear industry regulator who now opposes nuclear power. He is promoting his book, “Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator.”
“I find it fascinating that we have this discussion about spent nuclear fuel and nobody makes the obvious statement that we need to stop making it,” Jaczko said. “Either we have a problem with what to do with spent nuclear fuel … or we don’t have a problem and we can manage it safely. I think the right answer is somewhere in the middle.”
As the title suggests, the book directly addresses Jaczko’s turbulent tenure at the NRC, which ended with his resignation in 2012 after three years as chairman and having alienated all of his colleagues on the commission.
Armed with a doctorate in physics, Jaczko came to Washington, D.C., in 1999 and quickly landed a staff position with then-Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) He moved to the office of Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) less than two years later to support the senior lawmaker’s fight against Yucca Mountain – the isolated federal property in the Nevada desert that Congress in 1987 designated at the disposal site for U.S. spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear activities.
The location was unsuitable for a host of political, technical, and safety reasons, the book says. To start, the geology is vulnerable to water infiltration, which could enable the spread of radiation, according to Jaczko. Its proximity to Las Vegas, about 100 miles to the southeast, was another point of concern.
Reid eventually put Jaczko forward for membership on the NRC, and after a contentious two-year nomination process he joined the five-person commission in January 2005. In the early months of his first term, President Barack Obama elevated Jaczko to chairman in May 2009. His time in the leadership position was marked by the U.S. response to the March 2011 disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and the Obama administration’s cancellation of Yucca Mountain.
The Department of Energy filed the license application for the repository with the NRC in 2008, then requested to withdraw it less than two years later after Obama replaced George W. Bush in the White House. However, the NRC Atomic Licensing and Safety Board that was adjudicating the application rejected the withdrawal request. In his book, Jaczko describes the decision as “shenanigans”: “Despite the order to close the Yucca Mountain offices, shutter the facility and release the associated staff, the license would go forward,” he writes.
Jaczko said he then made the executive decision to halt NRC work on the license application in anticipation that Congress would soon cut off funding in the next budget cycle.
The book describes in sometimes-colorful detail Jaczko’s efforts to persuade his fellow commissioners to vote in favor of his decision, including what he describes as a phone call with “loudly irate” NRC Commissioner William Ostendorff. The campaign ended inconclusively, with fellow Democrats William Magwood and George Apostolakis recusing themselves from a vote. That meant the commission would not have a quorum for a vote on the decision opposed by Republican members Ostendorff and Kristine Svinicki, the book says.
Jaczko says he was puzzled by what followed: Claims of abuse of authority by the other commissioners and a probe by the NRC inspector general. “Whether I acted legally or illegally was a determination to be made by the agency’s general counsel, who had signed off on my decision. If there was any issue to be investigated, I felt, it was how the industry had tried so aggressively to influence the commission.”
The NRC inspector general in 2011 issued a report saying Jaczko had not been “forthcoming” with important information regarding his decision on Yucca Mountain. A follow-up report in 2012 laid out a series of examples of the-then chairman employing “intimidating and bullying tactics” to get his way on the commission.
All four of his colleagues on the panel by that time had written to the White House to complain about his behavior. Jaczko submitted his resignation in May 2012.
Of Jaczko’s peers at the time of his resignation, only Svinicki remains on the commission. President Donald Trump appointed her chairman in January 2017. An NRC spokesman said Thursday she had no comment on the book.
Ostendorff, a former U.S. Navy submarine officer and staffer for DOE and Congress, teaches at the United States Naval Academy. He said he has not seen Jaczko’s book and so could not comment.
Magwood, now director-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Nuclear Energy Agency, and Apostolakis, a nuclear science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did not respond to requests for comment.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, the Washington-based trade group for the nuclear industry, also declined to comment.
