WASHINGTON — A former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman and other issue experts made 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 here, said during a presentation at the Russell Senate Office Building 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 “Reset 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 what is now a roughly 100,000-metric-ton stockpile of spent nuclear fuel from commercial power reactors and high-level radioactive waste from government defense nuclear operations.
Topping the list would be removing authority for the program from the Department of Energy, along with the money that would pay for the disposal facility.
Congress in 1982 gave DOE until Jan. 31, 1998, to begin accepting the nation’s radioactive waste for disposal, and five years later decided it should be buried under Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The government has spent at least $15 billion to research, site, and develop its repository, but it today remains unlicensed, unbuilt, and vehemently opposed by its intended host state.
In the meantime, the waste sits at dozens of points of generation around the nation – primarily active and retired nuclear power plants. Utilities (and, by extension, their ratepayers) paid over $25 billion into the Nuclear Waste Fund intended to finance the repository, but have little to show for that money.
The Obama administration defunded the project in 2010, and Congress has now twice shot down the Trump administration’s efforts to resume the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission review of the DOE license application.
“We have no coordinated plan, and we haven’t had a coordinated plan, to deal with any of this mess,” Macfarlane said.
While the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says spent fuel can be stored safely for decades in hardened dry-storage canisters on-site at nuclear power plants, the impasse still creates a host of issues. That includes leaving properties unavailable for any other use even after the nuclear plant is decommissioned. There are already eight onetime nuclear power sites where now only the spent fuel remains, Macfarlane said.
The federal government has also already paid out more than $6 billion to compensate nuclear utilities for failing to meet its legal mandate to take the spent fuel off their hands. The total U.S. liability is expected to reach tens of billions of dollars.
Steering committee member Saida Engstrom, vice president for strategy and programs for Sweden’s SKB nuclear waste management company, noted that her nation and others that have successfully moved toward waste disposal solutions have first “hit the wall, failed, and had to reset their programs.”
The panel hopes the United States can do the same. Its recommendations are drawn from others nations’ experiences in nuclear waste management and recommendations put forth by U.S. experts in prior years, such as the Obama administration’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.
Among the recommendations:
- Creating an all new, utility-owned organization to manage spent fuel disposal, while for now keeping the Department of Energy in charge of defense waste. Such an approach has succeeded in Canada, Finland, Sweden, and elsewhere, the report says.
- Transferring the Nuclear Waste Fund to this new entity over a period of 25 years.
- Establish a consent-based site-selection approach under which local governments could study hosting a repository but be given veto authority after years of engagement. States would also be able to block a site after it has received its federal license, which could be overturned only by a supermajority of the U.S. Congress. The selection process would feature consideration of more than one location.
These measures would require changes to existing federal laws and regulations. That is why four members of the steering committee are in Washington for a week for meetings with lawmakers and congressional staff, Stanford University nuclear security professor Rod Ewing, one of the principal investigators for the report, told RadWaste Monitor. Ewing, former chairman of the federal 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. The committee’s effort will continue past this week’s meetings, he added.
Ewing and his peers made their pitch to a room full of congressional staff, journalists, and sometimes skeptical issue advocates.
Steve Frishman, a technical adviser for Nevada, noted that the report’s recommendations would not necessarily take Yucca Mountain out of contention as a disposal site. “How do you explain that line?”
“If the local community wants it to be on the list, then it would be considered, but it would still have to go through the consent process,” Ewing responded.
Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney Geoffrey Fettus, who attended the briefing, said the report’s recommendations do not necessarily provide a better solution to radioactive waste than prior approaches.
“There are lots of pages about consent and sharing power found in the report, but no real discussion of actually granting the kind of meaningful regulatory power – aka, abilities to permit, limit, condition, halt, or even shut down the proposed facility, as well as corrective action and citizen suit powers, all consistent with regular environmental law in every other context – that might finally lead to scientifically defensible and publicly accepted solutions,” he said in a statement to RadWaste Monitor.
