The incoming Biden administration should designate a senior official reporting to the White House to negotiate both long-term and interim radioactive waste storage with Congress, an Obama-era Department of Energy official said this week.
“A senior negotiator representing the administration would provide focus, leadership, and momentum for legislative action that puts the United States on a pathway to resolving this extremely important and difficult problem,” David Klaus, deputy undersecretary of management and performance at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration, wrote in a blog post for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
The negotiator could be a “sub-czar” reporting directly to the White House under climate policy czar Gina McCarthy, Klaus said. This sub-czar would work with Congress to find one or more possible locations for a long-term permanent storage facility, Klaus said.
Rod McCullum, senior director for fuel and decommissioning at the Nuclear Energy Institute, agreed with Klaus’s suggestion that a senior negotiator could more easily facilitate discussions between state governments and federal regulators about permanent and interim storage.
However, the negotiator should not get involved too early in the process of licensing interim storage sites, McCullum said. Instead, the official should enter negotiations only after licenses are granted to facilitate the concerns of the local authorities hosting these sites.
“I think if the government could come on and help them get over the final hurdles, that would be great,” McCullum said. But “if the negotiator comes in and says ‘I’m going to start a whole new process,’ that just sets us back.”
Klaus doesn’t think the timing of a negotiator’s involvement would affect the outcome of proposed interim storage projects. More importantly, he said in a phone interview with Exchange Monitor, the radwaste czar would fill in the holes in jurisdiction left by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
“If the NRC [licenses interim storage sites], it doesn’t answer questions. It doesn’t answer priority. It doesn’t answer compensation. It doesn’t deal with transportation issues,” Klaus said.
With the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain facility all but abandoned by both the Trump administration and the Biden team, negotiations on siting and development of a permanent repository are back at “square one,” Klaus said.
On the other hand, the Commission is scheduled to wrap up key environmental reviews this year for interim storage sites proposed by Holtec in New Mexico and Interim Storage Partners in Texas, after which the commission could move forward with licensing.
However, those sites will likely face opposition from local authorities, indigenous tribes, and other interested parties, Klaus said. An administration negotiator would coordinate with these interests and with Congress to provide compensation to host states and localities, he said.
The Biden-Harris transition team did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
