The Department of Energy’s top manager for spent fuel and high-level waste, Paul Murray, told a local panel in California Thursday several consolidated interim nuclear fuel storage sites will be needed across the nation.
“How many sites do I think we really need,” Murray said during a presentation to the San Onofre Community Engagement Panel. “I think we need about five sites. Not just one.”
Likewise, Murray is interested in the idea of using one or more shuttered nuclear reactor sites as interim storage sites. The 2012 report from the Blue-Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future mentioned the idea of moving fuel from one shutdown reactor site to another. “I want to explore that,” Murray said.
Murray joined DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy in 2023 after a long nuclear industry career, including 16 years as a manager at Orano. He head’s DOE’s consent-based siting program for spent nuclear fuel. He told a quarterly meeting of the San Onofre Community Engagement Panel his job is to pick up spent fuel from the nation’s retired nuclear reactors. The volunteer panel is set up to support open communication between the company and the community on decommissioning issues.
There are already 20 shut-down commercial reactor sites in the United States, Murray said. Certain communities involved might be open to considering interim storage, he added.
In June 2013, Southern California Edison announced it was permanently retiring its two remaining reactor units at its San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Clemente, Calif. Some major components have already been removed for disposal.
At the community board meeting, Murray was introduced by Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) who said San Onofre’s 3-million-plus pounds of spent nuclear fuel is currently held a few hundred feet from the Pacific Ocean. The locals want to see this high-level radioactive waste moved somewhere further inland, Levin added.
Once all the existing commercial power reactors in the United States retire, the nation will have about 141,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, in addition to an estimated 21,000 canisters of vitrified waste from the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, Murray said.
Provided DOE opens up its first consent-based interim storage site by 2040, and starts moving spent fuel at the rate of 3,000 tons annually, it could still take 50 years, until 2090, to move all the fuel from retired reactors.
But DOE continues to be sued to the tune of about $800 million annually for its failure to take title to spent fuel from power reactors, Murray said. The liability currently exceeds $34 billion. The nation did not get into this “mess” overnight, Murray said, and the problem won’t be solved overnight.
The United States will still eventually need a deep geologic repository, Murray said. In doing this, DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy must collaborate with both its international partners as well as its sister branch, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, he said. The Environmental Management office already runs a deep underground geologic repository for defense-related transuranic waste, Murray said referring to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
