HENDERSON, Nev. — While it was never formally canceled, there is little doubt the Obama administration’s initiative for consent-based siting of the nation’s nuclear waste has no future while its successor is in office, a senior Department of Energy official said Wednesday.
The agency still has a web page for consent-based siting, but since early 2017 it has said only that DOE is updating the website to reflect its priorities under President Donald Trump and Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
“I would say as far as the administration is concerned its priorities are discernable by what’s in the budget request, the annual budget request that comes out in February,” said Bill Boyle, director of the Office of Used Nuclear Fuel Disposition Research and Development, Fuel Cycle Technologies in DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy.
“Consent-based siting isn’t mentioned since the election in 2016, but going back to the framework of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act is. That’s the administration’s point of view, and that’s what the Department of Energy is involved with,” he added during a presentation at the ExchangeMonitor’s RadWaste Summit.
That has meant seeking funding for licensing a repository for at least 77,000 metric tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, as laid out in Congress’ 1987 amendment to the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The Trump administration has sought that money in its 2018 and 2019 budget requests, but Congress has yet to agree.
While Yucca Mountain has been the law of the land for decades, licensing had only been underway for two years when President Barack Obama cut off funding for the proceeding in 2010. He then established the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, which in January 2012 issued a final report recommending a “phased, adaptive,” consent-based approach to selecting locations for disposal of nuclear waste.
The intent was to secure agreement from local stakeholders in building any nuclear waste management facility. “In practical terms, this means encouraging communities to volunteer to be considered to host a new nuclear waste management facility while also allowing for the waste management organization to approach communities that it believes can meet the siting requirements,” the commission report said. “Siting processes for waste management facilities should include a flexible and substantial incentive program.”
The Obama administration DOE took up that approach, holding a number of meetings around the country and issuing a draft document laying out its process just eight days before Trump took office. The program went no further.
One former DOE official said Wednesday that is for the best.
“It has political appeal. It sounds great,” but “it ain’t going to happen,” Ward Sproat, former director of the department’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said during a separate panel discussion at the conference.
Sproat cited several reasons for this, including the low likelihood of securing consent in the first place. There is also the question of who must give consent, Sproat said – which might involve any or all of the following: the community that would host the facility, surrounding communities, the host state, surrounding states, and jurisdictions along waste transport routes.
Politicians and other locals who agree to the repository might not be present when it is determined whether a location is acceptable for a waste repository, much less construction of the facility, according to Sproat, who left DOE in 2009 and retired after nearly a decade at Bechtel. He noted that it took 30 years of studying the geology at Yucca Mountain to determine it was a viable waste site.
“You’re easily talking 30-plus years to make all of that happen, with the potential for off-ramps of somebody withdrawing consent during that time period,” he said. “Time is not on your side of any of these issues.”
Nonetheless, consent-based siting remains an attractive option for some issue watchers. That would be the preference for Nevada state officials, who have fought the federal government’s plan to ship waste to Yucca Mountain. Just this week, a report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on nuclear energy noted “some support” for the approach laid out by the Blue Ribbon Commission.
