Congress should create a new agency, separate from the Department of Energy, to manage American nuclear waste, the Bipartisan Policy Center recommended in a report released Tuesday.
“The failures of the past decades are widely acknowledged and have been extensively documented,” former U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), co-chair of the think tank’s Nuclear Waste Council, said Tuesday at a public event. “Indeed, if there is a single point on which everyone involved in the nuclear waste policy debate can agree it is that the approach to date has not delivered results.”
Forming a new agency was one of seven recommendations in the Nuclear Waste Council’s 36-page report. Roughly 74,000 metric tons of spent fuel is now stored at about 100 American nuclear sites as a result of DOE’s failure to take title to the waste by 1998, as dictated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The federal government has paid more than $5.3 billion in damages to utilities holding the waste, and DOE estimates the remaining liabilities at $23.7 billion.
The department is developing a consent-based siting process to manage nuclear waste, which could serve as one alternative for the canceled geologic repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The process was recommended by the Obama administration’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, which also suggested “a new organization dedicated solely to implementing the waste management program.”
Acting Assistant DOE Secretary for Nuclear Energy John Kotek said earlier this month the department plans to establish a new office dedicated solely to the department’s Integrated Waste Management System (IWMS), which includes consent-based siting.
Dicks said the council has not taken a formal stance on Yucca Mountain, but believes consent-based siting is the right approach. Former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, the Nuclear Waste Council co-chair, addressed the concern that consent-based siting is simply applying lipstick to the nuclear waste management pig.
“I don’t think we ought to deceive ourselves and say just because we use the word consent-based that this is going to be a smooth, easy, kumbaya type of process,” Perdue said. “It’s not going to solve the type of problem – or magically the spell – the controversies that have bedeviled this nation’s nuclear waste conundrum for decades. … We’re under no illusions that pursuing a consent-based path is going to be easy, much less guaranteed to succeed, but we do believe it is the right path to go forward on.”
Nicks and Perdue both noted encouraging signs coming from Texas and New Mexico, where, respectively, Waste Control Specialists and Holtec International are planning interim nuclear waste storage facilities. WCS has applied for a 40-year license to operate a facility that could hold up to 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel at its waste storage complex in Andrews County, Texas. Holtec plans to submit its own application in March for a facility near Carlsbad with a capacity of 70,000 metric tons of spent fuel.
Members of BPC’s Nuclear Waste Council met with residents and representatives from both communities in March 2016 at the URENCO enrichment facility in Eunice, N.M.
“We really felt like we had seen communities that felt engaged and empowered, literally empowered on a fair basis,” Perdue said. “One of the things that I think had to do with that was that they felt like they were dealing with a private entity, where the federal government and the state regulators kind of had the black-and-white-striped shirts kind of as the referees.”
Dicks said that while the council has not taken a stance on Yucca Mountain, he anticipates House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and panel member Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) advocating for NRC licensing to resume for the facility. Upton and Shimkus in March requested that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determine what federal financial resources are available for license review resumption. This potential activity, Dicks said, is the direct result of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) pending retirement in January.
“(Reid) has been the most significant opponent of Yucca Mountain, representing his state in Nevada, and now that he is leaving the Senate, there’s going to be a revisit, especially on the appropriations matters,” Dicks said. “Whether that’s going to make a big, new difference, we’ll have to wait and see.”
Dicks said he regarded DOE’s consent-based siting efforts thus far as the “spade work” for legislation to follow. As a former appropriator, he said he expects a lawmaker such as Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chairman of the House Appropriations energy subcommittee, to introduce language saying “take a look at (consent-based siting), take a further look at this.”
