A former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman and other issue experts are making the rounds on Capitol Hill this week to argue for a top-to-bottom rethinking of management of the nation’s nuclear waste.
“The situation in the U.S. is terribly broken, has been for decades, and without some major change to the program I don’t really see a way out,” Allison Macfarlane, NRC chairman from 2012 to 2014 and now a public policy and international affairs professor at The George Washington University, said during a presentation on the report “Reset of America’s Nuclear Waste Management.”
The 126-page report, issued in December, was the result of years of work by a 12-person steering committee backed by GWU, Stanford University, and other organizations. Its aim is to promote an alternative to the decades-long standstill in permanent disposal of a growing stockpile of spent nuclear fuel from commercial power reactors and high-level radioactive waste from government defense nuclear operations.
Congress in 1982 gave the Department of Energy until January 1998 to begin taking that waste for disposal, and five years later decided it should be buried under Yucca Mountain in Nevada. However, that repository remains unlicensed and unbuilt.
Among the recommendations from the report: Creating an all new, nongovernmental organization to manage spent fuel disposal, while for now keeping the Department of Energy in charge of defense waste; transferring the Nuclear Waste Fund that will pay for the repository to this new entity; and ensuring a consent-based disposal site-selection approach — though that would not necessarily exclude Yucca Mountain.
Some of the proposed updates would require changes to existing federal laws and regulations.
Four members of the steering committee are in Washington for a week for meetings with lawmakers and congressional staff, said Stanford University nuclear security professor Rod Ewing, one of the principal investigators for the report. Ewing, former chairman of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, declined to name specific House and Senate members lined up for meetings.
“We’re not campaigning for this report to be immediately passed into law, but we’re trying to identify the issues that have to be considered” in any future legislation, Ewing said.
