Borehole Test Trouble Shows Need for ‘Consent-Based’ Waste Storage: Kotek

The cancellation of a planned nuclear waste storage test borehole project in Pierce County, N.D., demonstrates the need to secure community backing for future waste facilities, a senior Department of Energy official said Tuesday.

In the face of strong opposition from local residents and the county commission, DOE last week said it would not move forward with the five-year, $35 million dig that was to break ground on Sept. 1. The aim of the project had been to test the viability of drilling deep boreholes into crystalline rock formations to hold DOE-managed high-level nuclear waste. DOE and lead contractor Battelle Memorial Institute emphasized repeatedly that no actual nuclear material would be used in the test and that similar geologic conditions can be found across the country. Local residents, though, said they had not received sufficient notice of the project and worried the work could open the door to nuclear waste one day being stored near their homes.

“One of the things that this has underscored for me is the importance of a consent-based siting process. This was a contract for a research project,” John Kotek, acting assistant secretary for DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy. “We didn’t go off and ask the competing teams to do a consent-based siting process. And it’s a facility that’s not going to be using nuclear waste. We didn’t ask them to do the kinds of things that we’re asking them to do here.”

Kotek was referring to the process DOE formally began in December to find locations for one or more pilot sites, interim consolidated spent fuel storage facilities, and ultimately deep geologic repositories for the spent fuel and high-level waste. Key to that will be gaining the support of local and state stakeholders, DOE has said.

Kotek did not discuss how DOE might move ahead with the borehole project at another location. “A lot of that, as you can imagine, is still under discussion.”

Panelist Chuck Bernhard, president of Bernhard Consulting, said an industry official in the room had warned him that the failure in North Dakota had set back the entire consent-based process by a decade. The public will now be more skeptical of future waste-siting projects, Bernhard said: “DOE seems to have a hard time getting this right. They do not yet know how to respond to some stakeholder sensitivities to anything involving nuclear waste, and I mean anything.”

Waste Management Specialists and Holtec International are preparing in coming months to submit license applications with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for spent fuel storage sites in, respectively, West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. While DOE officials at the conference have declared their intention to consider other sites, that is a waste of time when two communities have already back these projects, said John Heaton, chair of the Carlsbad Mayor’s Nuclear Task Force. “When you have two volunteers, why are you out there seeking more? What’s the point?”