Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
5/1/2015
Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) advised Nevadans this week not to dismiss scientific evidence in favor of Yucca Mountain too easily, according to an op-ed in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Shimkus has championed Yucca Mountain as the only solution for the nation’s nuclear waste problem, pushing both the Department of Energy and the state of Nevada to adhere to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. In his op-ed, Shimkus touted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Safety Evaluation Report, released earlier this year, which found DOE’s design met most regulatory requirements to protect public health and safety.
“The reality is it took more than 30 years and $15 billion before world-class scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and national laboratories and universities (including Nevada schools) were satisfied with their research to answer the fundamental question in the Yucca Mountain debate: Could this remote mountain — an invaluable national asset on a restricted plot of federal land bigger than the entire state of Rhode Island, surrounded by sparsely populated desert next to a former nuclear weapons test site — be used to safely and permanently secure our nation’s spent nuclear fuel and defense waste?” Shimkus wrote. “The NRC’s answer, detailed in a nearly 2,000-page, five-volume Safety Evaluation Report finalized in January 2015, is ‘yes.’ Just as important as the finding that Yucca Mountain could meet all safety requirements for no less than a million years are the scientific methods used to reach that conclusion.”
House Republicans, led by Shimkus, have announced plans to introduce legislation soon that would incentivize Nevada to host a repository, mainly through infrastructure and economic boosts. Shimkus called on the state this week to enter into those discussions. “If Nevada becomes a willing partner with the federal government to host a permanent repository, the state would benefit from the return of thousands of high-paying jobs and infrastructure projects necessary to move the shipments of spent fuel and defense materials to the mountain without intersecting population centers,” he wrote. “Some financial benefits and the opportunity to negotiate benefit agreements are already law. Nevada would also benefit from other advantages associated with host communities, such as increased local and state tax revenue and an emphasis on high-quality educational programs”
Nevada, though, has argued the site does not meet scientific standards. The state has raised approximately 300 contentions to the Yucca license application. The NRC still needs to adjudicate those complaints before the licensing review can move forward. The NRC itself even said in the SER that water and land right issues still remain that could derail the review.
Murkowski Pushes Moniz on Nuclear Waste
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chair Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), meanwhile, pushed Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz this week on why the Department of Energy did not include spent nuclear fuel policy in its Quadrennial Energy Review. DOE sponsored the QER as an attempt to identify key areas within the energy infrastructure arena that needed improvement. Murkowski has supported efforts in the Senate for nuclear waste reform in the past, going so far as to co-sponsor the Senate bill that would introduce interim storage as part of the nation’s disposal strategy. “There was very little in the QER about nuclear energy and really nothing on the backend of the fuel cycle,” Murkowski said during a Senate hearing this week. Murkowski said she plans to hold a Senate Energy hearing on the nuclear waste legislation in the next month and a half.
Moniz, meanwhile, maintained that the QER was meant for energy infrastructure, not nuclear energy policy. “Again, the QER was on infrastructure and moving energy around, opposed to nuclear power. I think you are correct,” Moniz said. “We could have put something in there in terms of transportation of spent nuclear fuel. We do have in our budget request for FY16 about $6.9 million specifically to address the transportation questions of spent fuel including the kinds of rail casks you would need, etc. So, that’s in there, but otherwise we did not address that in the QER. But I am happy to keep talking about that, including the storage options, and the transportation options, and developing consent-based processes, and looking at the defense-waste pathways that we can now pursue.”
A consent-based pilot consolidated storage facility is the preferred strategy of the Department of Energy to satisfy the nation’s spent fuel disposal needs, but due to language in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act the Department cannot consider other sites beyond Yucca Mountain in Nevada without Congressional approval. Moniz, however, in an announcement this spring, said that the Department would begin to take “affirmative steps” to siting a consent-based pilot interim storage facility. DOE has been working on generic analyses of how to move forward with an interim storage facility, but now DOE will take a much more proactive approach in talking with actual communities about hosting a facility, Moniz said. Construction of a facility, though, cannot occur without Congressional approval.
