The U.S. Department of Energy partially or fully approved 15 of the 20 recommendations submitted by the Savannah River Site’s Citizens Advisory Board (CAB), from January 2016 through December 2017. Of the five other recommendations, three are still pending and the other two were denied in full.
The high approval rating signals to board members that their opinions matter to those who run the department. However, the more contentious an issue – say, urging against shipment of radioactive materials to the South Carolina facility – the more likely it is that a recommendation will be fully or partially denied.
“They have to make the right decisions based on what they’re allowed to do,” former CAB member Earl Sheppard, who just wrapped up a six-year term on the board, said in a telephone interview. “The department has to be a good steward of government money and so they have to take certain things into consideration.”
The SRS CAB is one of several boards under the broader DOE Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board (EMSSAB). Like the other boards, it offers local advice and recommendations on nuclear cleanup at DOE facilities.
The 25-member Savannah River advisory body is broken up into five committees that each focus on various aspects of the site’s missions, including liquid waste treatment and receipt of nuclear materials. The committees routinely approve recommendations on these issues, which go to the full board for a final vote. If approved, the recommendations are then sent to DOE headquarters for consideration.
For example, the department partially accepted a July 2017 recommendation to not consider SRS as a potential interim storage facility for high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel. The department denied a central component of the request, saying the Office of Environmental Management (EM) – which handles CAB recommendations – has no purview over interim waste storage. That matter is handled by DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, the department wrote in its response.
In that same recommendation, the board asked DOE to stabilize and remove the site’s stockpiles of those waste forms as soon as possible, and not wait until DOE builds a permanent repository. The Savannah River Site houses more than 30 million gallons of high-level waste, a byproduct of Cold War nuclear weapons production. It also stores about 2,700 bundles of spent fuel that originated from operations at SRS and other sites. The department accepted the first portion of the CAB request, but said the second part would interfere with the federal government’s consent-based approach to nuclear waste storage.
Around the same time of this recommendation, June 2017, the consent-based topic page on the DOE website went mostly blank, which could mean a change in the federal government’s approach to the issue. The page now reads only, “Thank you for your interest in this topic. We are currently updating our website to reflect the Department’s priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Perry.”
In another touchy subject, DOE did not take up a 2017 recommendation against sending highly enriched uranium (HEU) from Germany to SRS.
