The following interview with Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Poneman, who announced this week plans to leave DOE in the fall, was conducted by ExchangeMonitor Publications Editor-in-Chief Mike Nartker.
RW Monitor
6/20/2014
As the Department of Energy looks to move forward with a consent-based approach to siting new interim and permanent facilities for high-level waste, how concerned are you that the recent incidents that have shut down the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a facility that for so long was held up as the model to show DOE can run a repository, will set back efforts to locate new facilities? Are you concerned that communities will look at WIPP and be concerned that similar incidents can happen at their sites if they choose to participate?
Well, I think I have to separate that into two pieces, because I don’t think there is any question but that the consent-based siting which is codified in the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future is the best practice. That’s in fact, the only long-term sustainable approach.
The second part is what happened at WIPP. The critical question now is how we respond it, how we deal with it both in terms of dealing with literally the facts on the ground and getting in there and cleaning it up and also our dealing with these larger governance issues about who is accountable for what activity, and why what happened happened. There are always going to be problems, but it’s going to be how we respond to the challenge that determines if we are able to sustain the level of public confidence in any site that’s going to lead that community to provide its consent in a consent-based system.
As you leave the Department, do you think Yucca Mountain is once and for all off the table?
I thought from the beginning, even before we received the Blue Ribbon Commission report, that consent-based approach to siting was the only thing that worked. To me, the question you asked is like a question that a judge would say we do not need to reach, because you don’t satisfy the threshold of a consensually accepted site. So whether the engineered barriers and so on would have worked over time or with some level of investment, I have not reached because I’m still hung up on the first issue, which is it was not a site in the end that enjoyed sufficient support from the community in which it was based to be a viable option. And so, all the other issues fall by the wayside, because you don’t have that preliminary threshold test met.
We have seen other places like Finland where that test is met. I can’t compare the geology of those places to this place. What I can compare is the process. And if you have a process that’s a clean one, that gives communities an opportunity to be heard, I think ultimately you’re going to end up with a sustainable path forward.
My sincere hope is that in the time that remains in this term that progress is made on implementing legislation for the Blue Ribbon Commission. Their excellent recommendations and conclusions actually laid the predicate for the first sustainable, consensually-based approach to the back end of the fuel cycle that I can recall since working as a summer intern for Senator John Glenn in 1975. Because I think we all agree, that at the end of the day, nuclear energy can’t play the role that the president has suggested in terms of long-term element of our low-carbon portfolio absent resolving this problem.
I hope that the very good work that started in the Senate of turning that into legislation succeeds and that we end up with a law, present it to the president, that’s going to finally once and for all put us on a path forward where you can get, past the backward looking Yucca debate and into a discussion of what’s going to work to make nuclear energy a viable portion of a low-carbon future because it’s got tremendous potential, but obviously we’re not going to realize the potential if we don’t address this problem.
With nuclear energy, where do you see the future of domestic U.S. uranium enrichment?
I’d make two points. Number one, the national security requirements for domestic enrichment I don’t see as changing. So it’s going to be important to the United States of America always to have a domestic source of enrichment.
Number two, as we look to a world that is, after an appropriate pause for reflection and taking into account the lessons of Fukushima, now continuing on a path of deploying nuclear energy, I think it’s in our long-term national interest from a national security perspective, from a non-proliferation perspective and, yes, from an economic perspective for the United States to play an important role not only in terms of meeting its own national security requirements in the narrow sense but also being a global player in non-proliferation and in nuclear energy. So I certainly hope that we are able to sustain that kind of domestic enrichment capability moving forward because I believe it’s strongly in our national interest.
To that end, the Department has spent a number of years, to heavy criticism, in effect propping up USEC. Now USEC has moved to file bankruptcy, and DOE is taking over the American Centrifuge Project. Were those years and that expenditure to try to keep USEC afloat basically worth it?
On this question, I can’t accept the premise. I think there is a common misperception that the U.S. was trying to prop up a specific company. That was never, as far as I knew, the U.S. objective. The U.S. objective has been to sustain a domestic capability. It happens to be that the indigenous technology that we had to pursue was the American Centrifuge Project and happens that USEC was the company that was pursuing that capability. But the objective from a U.S. strategic standpoint was in sustaining and developing that technology and that option. And apart from its role as the executive agent for the implementation of the government-to-government HEU deal, USEC is simply viewed as a company.
Has it been worth it to seek to develop an indigenous nuclear technology to allow domestic enrichment to continue to be a home-grown element of the American nuclear future? I think the answer to that is yes. Do I know now if this particular approach is going to work? I can’t answer that right now. We have a really smart team of people, including folks out at Oak Ridge, who are evaluating all the options including this one. But I think that the effort to stay in that market space of an indigenous technology for enrichment is strategically the right thing for the United States.
As we wrap things up, what’s the one thing you’re most proud of during your time at the Department?
It’s hard to single it out. I am proud of the progress that we have made in trying to strengthen our project management. I am proud of developing and standing up stronger emergency response capability, which we really utilized very heavily in Fukushima response but then evolved into something broader that could respond to climate change and enhance resilience in response to such events as Hurricane Sandy. I’m proud of strengthening our cyber security posture significantly. I am proud of the role that we played in helping to fulfill the president’s Prague vision both on the non-proliferation side and in developing an international framework for civil nuclear cooperation, as well as making sure we are making the prudent investments to sustain the safety, reliability and effectiveness of our deterrent.
I’m also proud of what we were able to do in terms of the Recovery Act, in facilitating the introduction at commercial scale of clean energy technologies that really help change our domestic energy marketplace. We didn’t have any grid-scale solar PV, any grid-scale concentrated solar plants. Through the loan guarantee program we have built a number of these units. We now have operating renewable power generation assets that have demonstrated the business proposition to such a degree that private capital is now coming in.
So that whole set of so-called 1705 loans, we’re proud of those. We’re proud of what we were able to do with advanced vehicle technologies and investing the $5.9 billion that went into the fleet of Ford Motors, making more efficient and less polluting vehicles in a substantial market share. But then a much smaller market share but one with a lot of promise was the investment we made in Tesla, an all-electric vehicle, where the borrower paid back the loan early. So that set of transformational investments that helped to drive our energy economy and our manufacturing initiatives into a new direction is not only going to lower carbon, it’s also going to produce jobs, prosperity, and really strong economic opportunities for the country.
What’s the one thing you wish could have gone differently?
You always wish that you could have done more. In terms of work in progress, even though it’s a source of some satisfaction, in project management, I’d like to do even better. And in terms of a very sustained effort at enhancing our safety and security culture and again, I think we’ve made a lot of progress, but that’s something that’s going to require continued and sustained attention.
Lastly, what’s next for you? Where do you go from here?
This has been a marathon. I’ve really, really enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to thinking about what comes next. For the first time in a long time I’ve got some writing ideas and I want to have some chance to do that. And I’m going to be spending some time back at Harvard, at my alma mater, in fact the research center I used to work at as an undergraduate, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. It’s always great to get up there because you get people who are not part of this bureaucratic world but with deep expertise. So I’m looking forward to having a chance to sit down, brainstorm, write about issues I really care about, and then think what comes next.
