The current administration needs to put together a national independent waste management organization and invest in new nuclear disposal technology to get national waste management going in the right direction, Rod Baltzer said in a Wednesday webinar.
San Diego-based waste management coalition Spent Fuel Solutions held a webinar with Baltzer, who is U.S. Nuclear Industry Council (USNIC) Back-End Working Group chair, to discuss the organization’s waste management policy paper.
Baltzer is also CEO of Deep Isolation, a company pursuing deep borehole disposal technology. The California-based company completed a disposal canister demonstration for tri-structural isotropic (TRISO) spent fuel earlier this year.
While the Department of Energy has many subagencies, Baltzer said DOE likely needs a dedicated organization to deal with nuclear waste.
“Spent fuel is one out of the thousand items they [DOE] need to do every day,” Baltzer said.”We need an entity that is really mission-driven, accountable and has sufficient funding to just focus on spent fuel and that is their own job.”
An independent waste management organization can focus on one task and partner with the U.S. nuclear industry on the issue, Baltzer said.
Collaborative-based siting, the Donald Trump administration’s twist on what was called consent-based siting under the Joe Biden administration, was another area of focus. After the cancellation of the Yucca Mountain deep geologic repository project, DOE should look to work with communities to opt-into a process instead of forced into one, Baltzer said.
Yucca Mountain was to be a national permanent repository for high-level nuclear waste through the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA). But the project was canceled during the Barack Obama administration after political resistance from Nevada.
In recent years, DOE has put together an effort focused on consent-based/collaborative-based siting for spent fuel repositories. The agency has a dedicated office under its Office of Nuclear Energy.
For things to start moving, Baltzer said technological innovation is needed.
“We really want to see [it] kind of hands-on, so let’s start building stuff that people can kick the tires,” Baltzer said. “Pilot projects, cask demonstrations and these new advanced reactors and reprocessing facilities as they start to go up. [To] make sure people can come to those and see what they’re all about.”
Baltzer cited nuclear fuel recycling technology and facilities, as well as deep borehole technology for waste management solutions. Deep borehole disposal is the concept of storing nuclear waste in extremely deep boreholes that can be placed as deep as three miles underground.
Legislation, such as NWPA, could be a barrier going forward. In the NWPA, it orders that a second repository cannot be pursued without Congressional approval, Baltzer said. He said DOE needs to get ahead on those potential hurdles.
“We don’t have to kill Yucca Mountain, but we can’t start anything else,” Baltzer said. “So we need to open that up and start something else. Let’s not just hitch ourselves to one thing.”
USNIC’s action plan “Action Plan for Transforming the Back End of the U.S. Nuclear Fuel Cycle” was published June 13. The policy paper provides an outline for providing permanent disposal of the country’s high-level radioactive waste or spent nuclear fuel.
USNIC moved forward with a waste management action plan, after President Trump issued an executive order Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base, for DOE to put together a report on how it intends to implement a waste management plan.
DOE is responsible for putting a report together within 240 days from the May 23 executive order, which would translate to about Jan. 18, 2026.
Baltzer has publicly praised the plan and said it can help the United States “break through decades of paralysis on waste disposal”.