The Biden administration, facing over half a century of US failure to deal with spent nuclear fuel, including the latest, 30-year debacle of the now-abandoned Yucca Mountain geologic repository in Nevada, has decided to revive a push for monitored, retrievable interim storage. US high-level nuclear waste totals some 86,000 tons of metal, and the inventory is growing.
On December 1, the Department of Energy published a notice in the Federal Register requesting information on “a consent-based siting process to identify federal interim storage facilities.” DOE’s nuclear energy office said it seeks “information on how to site Federal facilities for the temporary, consolidated storage of spent nuclear fuel using a consent-based approach. DOE anticipates that communities; governments at the local, State, and Tribal levels; members of the public; energy and environmental justice groups; organizations or corporations; and other stakeholders may be interested in responding to this request for information (RFI).”
DOE added, “We especially welcome insight from people, communities, and groups that have historically not been well-represented in these discussions. Responses to the RFI will inform development of a consent-based siting process, overall strategy for an integrated waste management system, and possibly a funding opportunity.”
It’s a concept that industry pitched during the debate over the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. But Congress rejected it in the face of opposition from environmental groups on the grounds that it was a nose under the waste storage tent for reprocessing to produce plutonium fuel, instead offocusing on deep geological storage.
The 1982 law quickly failed as all the locations the government proposed as candidate sites for burial of the waste pushed back strongly. They didn’t want their states to host a government waste facility that would have to operate safely for thousands of years. It was bipartisan pushback against geologic storage.
Facing a stalemate, in 1987, under the leadership of Senate Energy Committee Chairman J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), Congress adopted an idea first offered by Science magazine reporter Luther Carter (who died in 2020 at 92), to simply force the repository onto the Yucca Mountain site. It became widely known as the “Screw Nevada” act.
DOE move ahead on Yucca Mountain, spending some $15 billion before the Obama administration shelved the project in 2017, facing widespread opposition in Nevada. In 2020, Trump dealt the final blow to the project, saying, “Nevada, I hear you on Yucca Mountain.”
Now, Biden’s DOE is looking into a more collaborative, open process, where presumably nobody gets screwed but consents. At a Zoom conference this week, Katy Huff, deputy assistance secretary for nuclear energy and in charge of the DOE waste program, said, “We have asked for information, we are not yet seeking communities to volunteer.” She also said the administration’s position is that we “absolutely need to nuclear energy to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2050.”
Huff received a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. When tapped for the DOE job, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she led the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles Research Group.
There’s a major legal problem with siting interim nuclear waste in a site that is not a final geological repository, which Huff acknowledged. Under the 1982 law, which is still on the books, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must issue a license for a final geologic repository before it could approve interim storage.
Edwin Lyman, head of the nuclear program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, commented succinctly to The Quad Report. He said, “We strongly oppose efforts to develop consolidated interim storage sites without parallel development of a new repository siting program, so I think it is unfortunate that DOE is not giving priority to the latter first. And there still is no legislative authority that would allow DOE to fund consolidated interim storage without progress on a Yucca Mountain license.”
–Kennedy Maize