Smartphone technology revolutionized the way people make dinner reservations and get their news, but it hasn’t done much to enhance public discourse on nuclear waste management, according to Pajarito Scientific Corp. President and CEO George Dials.
“I’ve never seen a time when there was such an impasse in merely communicating,” Dials, an industry veteran who has held senior posts with organizations such as Babcock & Wilcox and the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, said Thursday at the ExchangeMonitor’s RadWaste Summit in Summerlin, Nev.
Dials added that the current problems run deeper than social media and communications technology. When radioactive waste is mentioned, the public makes no real distinction between spent reactor fuel from power plants, defense waste, or medical waste, Dials said.
The regulatory establishment hasn’t done much to help the situation, he added, citing broadly and poorly defined waste definitions. There are also “chaotic and often conflicting actions to identify, certify, and open nuclear waste sites,” Dials said.
Right now, Dials said, significant amounts of spent reactor fuel are stored at nuclear plants in states such as Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, which were in the path of Hurricane Irma.
“All things being equal, it’s going to be a really tough 2018,” Dials said.
Dials said he would like to see government do a better job of “risk-based” categorization of radioactive waste.
In addition, policy makers should better answer fundamental questions, Dials said. These include: How much waste is there? What are the major categories and risk profiles? Who owns it? Where is it located now?
While Dials called the Obama administration’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future a “pre-emptive strike” against the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, which has found fresh life under the Trump administration, he said the panel’s 2012 report did come up with some good recommendations.
Dials liked the commission’s idea of creating a quasi-governmental agency with real funding authority to address waste issues. One shortcoming, however, of the commission’s “consent-based” siting approach is that it didn’t specify “whose consent,” Dials said.
