In a hearing Thursday, Nevada’s senior U.S. Senator probed the director of the Idaho National Laboratory for ideas about nuclear waste policies for advanced reactors.
In written testimony for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s hearing about commercializing advanced nuclear reactors, John Wagner, laboratory director for Idaho lab prime contractor Battelle Energy Alliance, wrote that today’s nuclear-waste laws are inadequate.
“I think there’s a number of aspects in there, including Yucca Mountain, that have to be addressed for us to be able to move forward significantly on these issues,” Wagner said more than an hour-and-a-half into the roughly two-hour hearing after Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) invited him to expand on his written testimony.
Cortez Masto, who like most Nevada politicians opposes turning Yucca Mountain into the permanent deep geological repository for nuclear waste that Congress has authorized, asked Wagner about “the waste implications for new advanced reactors that we’re talking about and how … these factors affect the search for a workable waste disposal solution.”
Wagner said there are a variety of factors that might affect how new reactors, which are not always fueled by the ceramic-coated uranium oxide pellets that power commercial reactors in the current U.S. fleet, deal with their spent nuclear fuel.
“I don’t see any of them as insurmountable,” Wagner said. “They may affect cost, they may affect some design related matters, certainly packaging.”
Over the summer, the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy began its latest consent based siting program by spreading $26 million among 13 groups who will help the agency define what consent means and who may give it.
DOE has not said exactly what products this consortia of consent based siting grantees will produce, or whether what the consortia produces will be made public.
At the American Nuclear Society’s winter meeting in early November, a DOE official said the agency was taking things slowly to avoid the cold shoulders and bad publicity it got during the 1990s, the last time the agency tried to find a place for an interim storage facility to bridge the gap to a permanent repository.
“[W]e are engaging states but … we’re trying to pace ourselves because we are also learning from the previous experiences,” Natalia Saraeva, community and stakeholder engagement lead at DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, said at the American Nuclear Society’s winter meeting in Washington. “Like for example, [the] MRS [Monitored Retrieval Storage] negotiator sent a letter to 50 states and got 50 no’s.”
Meanwhile, Texas and New Mexico have each made it illegal to transport or store high-level nuclear waste in their territories. The bans were in response to separate attempts by two companies to open privately operated spent fuel depots, regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, along the east-west border of the two states.
“We’ve still got the Three Mile Island hangover,” Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) said at Thursday’s hearing. “The United States is so far behind on nuclear compared with the rest of the world, it is stunning to me.”
