The United States should stop trying to build a centralized disposal facility for its nuclear waste, and instead enact on a “decentralized” regime while pursuing new technologies to deal with the material, according to a new report from an environmental think tank.
“The current policy regime for nuclear waste management is broken,” the Oakland, Calif.-based Breakthrough Institute said in the report, “Beyond Yucca Mountain: Decentralization and Innovation for U.S. Nuclear Waste Management.” It notes that the federal government is more than two decades past the congressionally set deadline of Jan. 31, 1998, to begin disposal of spent fuel from nuclear power plants and high-level radioactive waste. Meanwhile, the assigned deep geologic repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., is neither licensed nor built.
The current storage system for used fuel, in which it is kept on-site in dry casks at nuclaer power plants, could be updated for long-term management, the report says. That system already has a “flawless” safety record, according to the Breakthrough Institute. With the assent of the participating communities, those sites could be formally licensed for interim storage of spent fuel.
“Then, as designated nuclear waste management facilities, the sites can provide benefits to their communities through payments from the Nuclear Waste Fund,” Breakthrough said. “For communities that do not consent to on-site storage, waste should be moved to the closest available consolidated interim storage sites that gain consent.”
That would go hand-in-hand with work on various forms of nuclear innovations, the report says. These would include alternative disposal technologies, recycling and reprocessing, and waste-fueled reactors.
