Congress needs to amend federal nuclear waste law, not only allow the government to build an interim storage facility for spent fuel, but also to allow private companies to develop spent fuel reprocessing technologies, the CEO of such a company told RadWaste Monitor this week.
“Congress is in the key role right now, because the Nuclear Waste Policy Act [NWPA] doesn’t allow for anything other than Yucca Mountain,” Ed McGinnis, CEO of aspirant nuclear fuel reprocessing company Curio Solutions, Uniondale, N.Y., and former acting assistant secretary for nuclear energy told RadWaste Monitor during an interview Wednesday. “That needs to be adjusted.”
NWPA, the federal law governing nuclear waste disposal, holds that the Department of Energy can only dispose of the nation’s spent fuel inventory at one site — Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a project that was indefinitely back-burnered after the Barack Obama administration cut funding for its license application in 2010.
McGinnis and Curio want to see the law changed to open up different opportunities for closing the nuclear fuel cycle.
In particular, McGinnis said that he wants to see Congress give DOE a “clear legislative signal” in the form of an NWPA amendment opening the door for spent fuel reprocessing that could allow the agency to “start seriously exploring public-private partnerships” on the issue.
McGinnis argued that any plan to decrease carbon emissions via nuclear power needs to take strategies like spent fuel recycling into account.
“One doesn’t have to be a mathematician to see that we’re still in a tailspin as far as a dramatic loss of U.S. nuclear energy generation capacity,” McGinnis said. “We don’t believe we’re going to be able to get the scale [of new reactors] truly needed to meet the 2050 climate objectives without addressing waste. We owe it to the public to, once and for all, come up with an intuitive, reasonable and cost-effective plan to recycle in a way that minimizes waste and maximizes efficiency.”
Curio, founded in 2020, has designs on developing a three-stage spent fuel recycling unit that McGinnis has said could accept about 400 metric tons of fuel at a time. If it became operational, McGinnis said that Curio’s facility, which would be about the size of a football stadium, could recycle the country’s 86,000 or so metric tons of spent fuel within 30 years.
McGinnis said he hopes that NWPA can be “amended in a way that gives maximum opportunity to deal with our nation’s so-called nuclear waste in the most cost effective way that protects the taxpayer.” The best way to accomplish that goal, in his opinion, “would be to maximize and leverage the private sector and the nuclear energy technology innovation sector.”
