Washington Post and Nature urge renewed efforts to solve nuclear waste problem
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0125
At a time of movement, or at least talk, in the US Senate concerning nuclear waste, editorials on both sides of the Atlantic—at the Washington Post and Nature—are calling for new political initiatives for solving the quite literally long-term problem.
Movement? In the US, the Wall Street Journal reported recently that Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who heads the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said senior senators from both parties have ‘found common ground’ concerning nuclear waste and that a draft bill will evolve during February.
The Post‘s editorial expresses cautious hope that talk will finally become action. The editors lament a many-decades ‘not-in-my-back-yard nightmare that the country is only partway through'—and that is ‘inexcusably expensive.’ In a mildly approving tone, they describe what they call the Obama administration’s ‘reasonable’ two-stage ‘plan for post-Yucca policymaking,’ but stipulate that it ‘relies on a big assumption—that someplace in the country will volunteer to host some waste.’
Then the editors suggest a new way of approaching the complex politics:
Congress tried forcing Nevada to take the country’s waste, the thinking goes; this time, the government should try recruitment rather than compulsion. We are skeptical that many localities would volunteer to host waste facilities, particularly the permanent repository, no matter the economic benefits. But perhaps the administration’s staged approach might be a way to convince communities, with each step building confidence that this material can be stored safely.
A few days later, the editorial’s cautious hopefulness got affirmation from one letter in a set of four lively responses. John Heaton of Carlsbad, New Mexico, who chairs the board of something called the Eddy–Lea Energy Alliance, engaged the not-in-my-back-yard (NIMBY) problem when he wrote, in part:
Several years ago, the New Mexico cities of Carlsbad and Hobbs, along with Eddy and Lea counties, formed the Eddy–Lea Energy Alliance. We, with popular community support, want to host an interim storage site in an empty, geologically stable area about halfway between the two cities. Why? Well, it turns out that the cure for NIMBY is a positive experience.
For the past 14 years, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has operated in the area as a repository for intermediate-level nuclear waste. The plant has worked so well and operated so safely that the area’s residents are very open-minded about the possibility of additional nuclear facilities. We’ll sleep well at night knowing that our region’s resources will be put to good use for the benefit of the nation.
The Nature editorial , citing Cumbria County Council’s unwillingness to see site-selection planning advanced for a deep repository, asserts: ‘Some scientists view the rejection as a failure of local politics, but they are wrong.’ That council has long experience with nuclear-waste politics. The editors note that despite a new resolve for ‘transparency, democratic inclusivity and scientific scrutiny,’ the actual cause of the unwillingness was a ‘lack of political will at almost every level of government.’ They prescribe a redoubling of earnest efforts to persuade citizens of the ‘moral, financial and environmental reasons to make deep geological disposal work.’ And they declare that both the US and the UK ‘must start again.’
It must be noted, though, that when the WSJ quoted Sen. Wyden, it also quoted his committee’s top Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. She said that passing a bill in the Senate is something ‘we haven’t been able to demonstrate.’
A few days later, The Hill reported the following :
A leading House GOP member on nuclear issues said Wednesday that Senate nuclear waste management legislation that does not identify Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository will not pass the House.
Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) said such a bill would not pass because the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act named the Nevada site as the nation’s permanent waste storage location.
‘Under my dead body will anything be moved through our chamber without a Yucca component,’ Shimkus, who chairs the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, told The Hill at a Washington, D.C., event hosted by Bloomberg Government and the Nuclear Energy Institute.
The article adds, ‘Framework for nuclear waste legislation in the Senate last year did not include Yucca, and probably won’t this session either.’
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.