Overhauling US nuclear waste policy

If there is nothing else that the disparate membership of the committee that was formed to advise the US on what to do with its highly radioactive waste can agree upon, it was in accord that no imminent crisis looms because of President Obama’s decision to terminate the more than two-decade-long plan to bury the waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

“There is no crisis, but there is an urgency to allay the world’s concerns,” said Mark Ayers, president of the building and construction trades department of the AFL-CIO, and one of 15 members of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. “We don’t have to do anything quickly to keep the public safe,” agreed John Rowe, CEO of Exelon Corp, which co-owns and operates 17 nuclear generating plants. “But we do have to do something decisively to gain credibility with the public.” Speaking at the commission’s inaugural public meeting on 25 March, Rowe added that the lack of a permanent solution for spent fuel is one of several reasons that Exelon has not been in the vanguard of companies that are eager to build more reactors.

Co-chaired by former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN) and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, the commission was announced on 1 February by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. The advisory panel has been given a full two years to provide its recommendations to Chu, although an interim report is expected in the fall of 2011.

The commissioners were briefed by federal officials about the enormity of the waste problem and the nation’s inability to deal with it. The current inventory of commercial spent fuel is now nearing 63 000 tons—approaching the 70 000 ton capacity for a repository that was imposed by statute. The Department of Energy, which had contracted to accept commercial waste in 1998, is now paying utilities about $500 million annually for the marginal costs the companies incur from keeping the material onsite. Matthew Crozat, a senior policy analyst in DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, told the commission that the waste will grow to 100 000 metric tons by 2050, even if all US operating reactors were to be shut down when their current licenses expire, and no new reactors were to be built. Alternatively, he said, spent fuel inventories would balloon to more than 200 000 tons if the nuclear industry were to grow at a rapid pace, which he defined as nine new reactors coming on line in each year after 2020.

In addition, Yucca Mountain was meant to serve as the destination for high-level liquid nuclear waste generated during cold war weapons production and currently held in underground tanks at several DOE sites. More than 20 000 canisters of that material were to be shipped to the Nevada repository after solidification into a glass-like material, said Frank Marcinowski, of DOE’s Environmental Management division.

Former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Richard Meserve noted that the on-site storage of spent fuels in so-called dry casks has taken much of the heat off of finding a long-term solution. But he warned that the spent fuel storage problem will become more acute as some older reactors are retired and decommissioned in the years ahead. Former senator and commissioner Pete Domenici (R-NM) touted the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in his state as an example for a geological storage facility, although WIPP was designed exclusively as a repository for slightly radioactive transuranic wastes generated during nuclear weapons production. Per Peterson, a nuclear engineering professor at UC Berkeley, said that a new waste policy must be more flexible than the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which offered no alternatives to Yucca Mountain and is unable to accommodate either the changes in technology or in the geopolitical landscape that have occurred over the past 25 years.

Chu has instructed the commission to consider the possibility of reprocessing commercial spent fuel, an option that has been prohibited in the US since the late 1970s due to fears that it could risk nuclear proliferation. Chu has also made clear that revival of the Yucca Mountain project, which has consumed more than $10 billion, is not among the options. That message was confirmed when DOE in March formally withdrew the Bush administration’s 2008 application from the NRC for a license to operate the proposed repository.

David Kramer