This week, a trade group for nuclear professionals released a 76-page report that recommends changes to the Environmental Protection Agency’s standards for nuclear-waste repositories.
Broadly, the new report from the Illinois-based American Nuclear Society (ANS) aims to make the standards set for the failed Yucca Mountain deep-geologic repository in Nevada the standard for all U.S. repositories. The Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future in 2012 made essentially the same recommendation, ANS wrote in the report.
“The current U.S. generic standards developed by the [Environmental Protection Agency] for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel, high-level radioactive waste, and transuranic waste are more than 30 years old and are inconsistent with modern international approaches to such health and safety standards,” ANS wrote in the report.
Under U.S. law today, Yucca Mountain has its own set of standards and all other types of geologic repositories, such as deep borehole storage, have another.
The report, ANS said, was not meant to pass judgment on the consent-based siting method that the Department of Energy is still developing more than a decade after the Blue Ribbon Commission for America’s Nuclear Future brought the phrase into the public consciousness.
To help define what consent is and who may give it, DOE has split $26 million among 13 awardees. In the last three years, the state governments of New Mexico and Texas have each passed laws forbidding the storage of spent nuclear fuel in their states’ territories. As of Thursday no one had challenged those laws in federal court.
