President Barrack Obama yesterday authorized the “de-comingling” of defense high-level nuclear waste from commercial high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel, paving the way for a defense waste-only repository. The Department of Energy had produced a report late last year that endorsed the safety and political case for dividing the two waste streams, mainly to engender confidence in a repository disposal process, to meet local state cleanup agreements, and to eliminate the political stalemate surrounding the disposal of commercial waste. According to Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, in remarks made at the Bipartisanship Policy Center, de-comingling would work best for the country due to the differences in the waste characteristics.
Defense waste has a finite inventory, as well as easier repository design requirements and cooler temperature ranges that could make siting and construction easier. “However, what I have emphasized is that the [defense] high-level waste repository has significantly lower challenges—again finite, small amount, much of it rather cool, and heterogeneity providing the opportunity for some selected alternative pathways,” Moniz said. “We think that this can go as fast as any nuclear facility can go. That remains to be demonstrated what that timeline is.” According to a DOE official, of the current supply of DOE-responsible waste that would go into a repository, defense waste constitutes 15 percent of the total inventory.
Moniz, though, assured stakeholders that the defense repository would run on a parallel track as a commercial repository. Some, including House Republican leadership, saw yesterday’s news as the DOE skirting its commercial responsibilities, but Moniz said the two would work concurrently. “To be clear the Administration strongly supports moving forward on a parallel track to address storage and disposal of commercial spent fuel,” Moniz said. “As I already mentioned, we plan to move in parallel to site a full-scale, consolidated interim storage facilities that could accept used fuel from shutdown reactors and potentially from other nuclear reactor sites.”
Also included in the de-comingling announcement, Moniz said the Department would begin to take affirmative steps to siting a consent-based pilot interim storage facility. DOE has been working on generic analyses of how to move forward with an interim storage facility, but now DOE will take a much more pro-active approach in talking with actual communities about hosting a facility. The Department will take a broad view of interested communities, Moniz said, and then work through various technical and consent-based requirements. While DOE will do more to site a facility, it cannot move forward with construction of a facility without congressional approval.
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