Continuing its support for a long-awaited spent fuel storage solution, the federal government’s independent nuclear waste experts recommended that the Department of Energy open its aperture to new approaches for including the public in its quest to site a federal interim storage facility, according to a letter sent to the agency’s nuclear power chief this week.
The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB) “applauds DOE for undertaking significant consent-based siting activities,” the organization told Assistant Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Energy Kathryn Huff in a letter Tuesday. But the agency should “significantly strengthen and improve its efforts.”
NWTRB’s letter comes after the board’s winter meeting, held in early March, during which it reviewed DOE’s activities related to the transportation, storage and disposition of spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste. The board also got an update from DOE about its consent-based siting process, for which the agency has said it is preparing a funding opportunity later this summer.
Among the actions NWTRB recommended to improve DOE’s interim storage inquiry, the board said that the department should engage “a larger and broader range” of stakeholders and other participants and that it should make an expanded effort “to include historically underrepresented communities.”
DOE should also draw on social, behavioral and public health sciences to help build out their community engagement, NWTRB said. “By informing all consent-based siting efforts with relevant outside scientific/technical knowledge and expertise on risk communication, risk perception, effective outreach, inclusiveness, and public engagement, DOE can identify ways to engage a broader range of participants, better understand public views and concerns, and improve the overall effectiveness and face validity of its consent-based siting work,” the letter said.
Finally, NWTRB told Huff that DOE should produce a “candid” lessons-learned report on its ill-fated 2016 deep borehole repository siting process and review international waste storage efforts.
NWTRB in December made similar comments to DOE, saying at the time that the agency needed to make a “long-term political commitment” to site a nuclear waste repository. The board told Huff at the time that some of the major challenges to successfully locating a storage site are “not primarily technical, but rather, involve fully addressing the societal concerns and challenges … in developing the technical research to be conducted.”
DOE’s latest attempt to pull together a federal storage solution for the more than 80,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, stored at reactor sites nationwide, comes as two private companies aim to build commercially-operated interim storage sites in the southwestern U.S.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already given Orano-Waste Control Specialists joint venture Interim Storage Partners (ISP) the go-ahead to build its site planned for Texas. The agency is still reviewing a similar plan proposed by Holtec International for New Mexico.
