The United States needs an all-new organization separated from the federal government if it hopes to finally end the decades-long impasse in building a permanent resting place for the nation’s nuclear waste, a panel of experts said Monday.
That was one of a long series of recommendations listed in the 126-page “Reset of America’s Nuclear Waste Management,” the result of years of work backed by Stanford University in California and the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The United States should also re-establish a consent-based approach to siting nuclear waste disposal, the report says.
The steering committee that produced the document said it unanimously agreed upon the need for an independent entity focused solely on management of the nation’s radioactive waste. While not quite unanimous, participants largely concurred that this new body should be a nonprofit, “nuclear-utility-owned implementing organization” (NUCO).
“In the view of the Steering Committee, the track record of nuclear utility-owned implementers abroad, coupled with the intrinsic harmonization of technical and business incentives, makes at least a prima facie case for considering the creation of a” NUCO, the panel said.
Committee members plan to press their case in January and February to members of Congress, their staffers, and government officials in Washington, Rodney Ewing, one of the report’s authors and co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, told RadWaste Monitor.
“I’m hoping, and it’s just a hope, that our report and the work of others will stimulate an interest and that that interest, or the discussion, will inform efforts to write legislation that will get the U.S. program back on track,” he said in a telephone interview.
Congress in 1982 charged the Department of Energy with permanent disposal of spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors and high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations. The department is already more than two decades past the legally mandated deadline of Jan. 31, 1998, to begin disposal of that material. The future of the repository to be built under Yucca Mountain in Nevada remains in question – the George W. Bush administration began licensing in 2008, the Obama administration canceled the project, and the Trump administration has not yet persuaded Congress to fund reviving the proceeding at the Energy Department and Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
“The current structure has shown itself to be too susceptible to changing political influence over the sustained period of effort necessary to site, construct and operate a repository,” the report says. “Funding fluctuations, changes in policy direction, and continuous changes in the technical strategy of the program have led to a situation where the DOE consistently fails to meet its goals and schedules.”
Meanwhile, the federal government to date has spent upward of $15 billion on Yucca Mountain and more than $7 billion to nuclear utilities stuck with the spent fuel. The government’s liability is expected to exceed $30 billion.
A number of organizations over several decades have put forth proposals for new approaches to managing nuclear waste, the Stanford-GWU report says, most recently the Obama administration’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. Utility-owned nonprofits have also succeeded in advancing nuclear waste management abroad; Finland, for example, is already building its waste repository.
Success in the United States would depend upon several factors, according to the report: a clear mission; organization that promotes public engagement and trust; a “focused” approach for research; “an implementation plan that matches the knowledge needs for geologic disposal”; and, crucially, an adequate and ongoing funding source.
The entity must also not be dependent on yearly funding from Congress, so it can be sure of sufficient money to pick, analyze, license, and build a repository, the report says.
Under the approach put forth in the report, Congress would empower a NUCO to be established as a nonprofit entity, owned wholly by participating nuclear utilities. The organization would assume the federal government’s nuclear waste management duties over the course of a year, and over a quarter-century it would take control of the Nuclear Waste Fund that would pay for disposal operations.
Once established, the nuclear waste entity would take charge of development of sites for management of commercial used fuel, high-level radioactive waste, and Greater-Than-Class C waste, plus material transferred from the federal government. Its mandate would also cover developing a waste transportation system; building a consolidated storage facility as needed for this waste ahead of permanent burial; and developing no fewer than two repositories in separate states, one of which might still be at Yucca Mountain.
The organization should also start its work focused only on commercial waste, leaving defense waste with the federal government or an organization chartered by the federal government, the steering committee said.
“The reason that we finally recommended defense waste be set to the side is, first, since we’re recommending a NUCO, something associated with the utilities and the nuclear power plants that generate spent fuel, it would be inappropriate to then include in that mixture defense waste,” Ewing said.
He also highlighted the “unbelievably complicated” nature of that issue – covering many government facilities; some like the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state that are massive in size and scope of the waste issue; and some subject to legally binding agreements between state and federal agencies.
Meanwhile, disposal of the spent fuel would address about 95 percent of the radioactivity of waste that must be interred in a geologic repository, Ewing noted.
Congress would also have to update existing laws to allow the Nuclear Waste Fund to be shifted to the new organization and ensure the NUCO works with the nuclear utilities to establish an integrated system for managing the radioactive waste, among other steps, the report says.
It also offers nine recommendations to promote consent-based siting, which the Obama administration took up but could not implement before leaving office, including: collaboration between the NUCO, industry, local stakeholders, and public interest groups; “articulate a structured and transparent process” for selecting potential sites and then reducing the number of locations; and ensure local municipalities, tribes, and states have significant authority to block a project.
“Finally, in order to insure a fair process, more than one site should be characterized, just as the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act originally required,” the committee said.
Members included former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Allison Macfarlane; Idaho National Laboratory Director Mark Peters; Christophe Poinssot, nuclear counselor at the French Embassy in China; and Sally Benson, director of Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy and the Global Climate and Energy Project. They heard from dozens of speakers over the course of five meetings, including issue experts, industry representatives, lawmakers and government officials, and watchdogs.
