Consent-based siting, or securing support at all levels of government for a nuclear-waste repository, “won’t be fun,” a Nuclear Regulatory Commission commission said Wednesday at an agency conference.
“Even a consent-based process is going to take time and it’s not going to be fun, but it’s the only way that’s going to be lasting,” NRC Commissioner Bradley Crowell said in response to a question from an unidentified member of the audience of the 2023 NRC Regulatory Information Conference in Rockville, Md., near Washington.
It was Crowell’s first Regulatory Information Conference and, as the commissioner with the least service time under his belt, he picked up the anchor leg of the conference’s traditional commissioner’s plenary, in which each commissioner gets to take the stage alone to make a speech and answer questions from attendees.
The Senate in August confirmed Crowell for his first stint with the NRC. Lawmakers vetted him along with Annie Caputo, who returned to the commission after a brief absence, bringing the body’s number to the legal maximum of five.
A Nevada native and a Democrat, Crowell spent a career in public service working among the entrenched opposition to Yucca Mountain, the only congressionally authorized permanent repository for nuclear waste in the U.S. Except for some pockets of local support in Nye County, Nevada opposes the project almost totally.
The Department of Energy is in charge of finding a home for what, by one estimate published in November by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, is a scattered inventory of spent fuel, 90,000 metric tons and growing, created by commercial electricity generation.
A senior DOE official last week testified before Congress that it will take another two years or so for the agency to define consent-based siting — or, as Crowell put it Wednesday at the NRC conference, “put[ting] the meat on the definition of what consent-based siting can be.”
The DOE effort is essentially a public input process that is divvying up $26 million in federal funding to anyone interested in helping the agency decide what constitutes consent, in the case of spent-nuclear-fuel storage.
Meanwhile, though Yucca Mountain is politically dead and DOE is barred by Congress from building an interim storage facility for spent fuel, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already licensed one commercially owned and operated spent-fuel depot and is poised to license another this year.
Interim Storage Partners, the joint venture of Orano and Waste Control Specialists, got an NRC license for its proposed spent-fuel depot in Andrews County, Texas in 2021. NRC has said it could issue a license for a similar facility proposed by Holtec International in Eddy County, N.M.
Texas and New Mexico have each sued the NRC, arguing that the commission illegally licensed the proposed interim storage sites. NRC fought the decisions in court and, in February, convinced a judge to scrap the lawsuit against the Holtec site.
