PHOENIX — An executive with an industry trade group thinks that the U.S. could have a geologic repository for its nuclear waste inventory by mid-century, he said here this week.
Rod McCullum, senior director of decommissioning and used fuel at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), said Monday during a panel at the Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix that he is “optimistic” that a permanent repository for the country’s spent fuel stockpile could be operational by 2059.
McCullum pointed to international repository projects, such as the ones underway in France, Finland and Canada, as learning opportunities for a future U.S. repository. “I am very optimistic that NEI can learn from these countries and join this party,” he said.
“We already have a good base of repository science here,” McCullum told RadWaste Monitor after the panel, “and DOE has ongoing work. You can say we’re stalled now, but if we got started, we could get there by 2059.”
The Department of Energy’s ongoing consent-based siting effort for a federal interim storage facility could also help get a permanent repository open by the middle of the century, McCullum added. “They’re really serious about this, and about getting consent,” he said. “It will lead to other things, including the process that may lead us to a repository.”
Meanwhile, technology such as spent fuel reprocessing, which would see existing spent fuel recycled for use in advanced nuclear reactors, “does not replace the need” for a permanent repository,” McCullum said. Advanced reactors will still generate waste that will need to be disposed of, he said.
The U.S. currently does not have a permanent facility to store the roughly 90,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel stored at reactor sites across the country. The only congressionally-authorized site for such a task, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, remains little more than a construction site after the Barack Obama administration pulled the project’s funding in 2010. The Joe Biden White House has said that it would not resume work on the site.
