Nuclear-waste disposal is still nuclear energy’s biggest problem, the senior U.S. Senator from West Virginia told a gathering of nuclear professionals this week in Washington.
“The biggest hurdle we have right now? What the hell do we do with the waste?” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said Monday during the opening plenary session of the American Nuclear Society’s (ANS) annual winter meeting.
“We feel like we know where every gram of it is and we’ve got some great interim solutions that’ll last hundreds of years,” session moderator Joseph Dominguez, president and CEO of Constellation Energy, said.
Manchin interrupted him.
“You all better step to the plate and help us,” said Manchin.
“We will,” said Dominguez, as Manchin kept talking.
Launching into a dialog that seemed to describe the Department of Energy’s effort to “entertain states getting involved” with nuclear waste through consent-based siting, Mahchin was unable to finish a thought that began with “I can tell you right now, I don’t see any state…”
Manchin announced last week he would not seek reelection to the Senate. His term will expire on Jan. 3, 2025.
DOE’s current consent-based siting process, spawned at a time when two states have already outlawed storage and transportation of high-level nuclear-waste in their territories, is intended to be an “equitable approach…that centers communities in the process of identifying a location, finally, for consolidating interim storage,” Kathryn Huff, DOE’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy, said during a Monday panel discussion at the ANS show after Manchin’s remarks.
Consent based siting deals “not just with science, but also with folks’ emotions and feelings around spent nuclear fuel and the unfairness and burdensome nature of wastes in general in our environment.” Huff said.
Meanwhile, another DOE official was scheduled Wednesday to chair a deep-dive panel discussion about consent-based siting and consolidated interim storage at the ANS meeting.
Kimberly Petry, most recently DOE’s associate deputy assistant secretary for nuclear energy, was to chair the panel, which was scheduled to begin at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday and run until 11:45 a.m. Eastern time.
Among the scheduled participants in the panel, titled “Are We on the Right Track,” were: Natalia Saraeva, team lead for consent-based siting at DOE; Monica Regalbuto, director of the integrated fuel cycle strategic initiative at the Idaho National Laboratory and a former DOE assistant secretary for environmental management; Jessica Lovering, co-founder and executive director of the Good Energy Collective energy think tank; and Bruce Montgomery, director of decommissioning and used fuel for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the energy’s main trade group in Washington.
