Nuclear waste management should not go overlooked as the U.S. weighs expanding its carbon-free energy market with more nuclear power, one of the newest members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said during an industry conference this week.
“Progress on nuclear waste management must keep pace with our renewed efforts to bring more carbon free nuclear power to market,” said NRC Commissioner Bradley Crowell during a keynote address Monday at the American Nuclear Society’s annual winter meeting, held both virtually and in-person in Phoenix.
“This includes both addressing the existing backlog of nuclear waste in need of permanent disposal, as well as not exacerbating the nuclear waste conundrum further,” Crowell said.
Crowell, who joined NRC’s five-member executive committee in August alongside Annie Caputo, said that the agency “must not lose focus” on the management of spent nuclear fuel inventory as it regulates and licenses new nuclear power.
Before joining NRC, Crowell was the director of the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, a position that he held since 2016. He was also assistant secretary of energy for congressional and intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Energy under the Barack Obama administration.
“It is my firm belief that it would be irresponsible to utilize nuclear energy to lower emissions and help address climate change, if in doing so, we knowingly allow for nuclear energy to become the harbinger of new multigenerational threats to our public health, safety and economy, namely in the form of unmanaged spent fuel and nuclear waste,” Crowell said.
Currently, there is no centralized facility to store the nearly 90,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel kept at civilian nuclear power plants nationwide. The only congressionally-authorized site for such a task, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, has been little more than an abandoned construction site since 2010 when the Barack Obama administration pulled the project’s funding.
However, some efforts are underway to create temporary storage solutions for spent fuel. NRC in September 2021 licensed Waste Control Specialists-Orano USA joint venture Interim Storage Partners to build a commercially-operated interim storage facility for such waste in west Texas. The agency is also considering a similar project proposed for New Mexico by nuclear services company Holtec International.
Those proposals, along with the Department of Energy’s ongoing efforts to site a federal interim storage facility, “are widely seen as essential precursors” to an eventual permanent repository for nuclear waste, Crowell said Monday.
Crowell added that “congressional action will ultimately be necessary” to realize a permanent disposal site — an apparent reference to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which currently identifies Yucca Mountain as the nation’s only legal repository.
“Let’s not allow nuclear energy to solve one problem while creating new, equally vexing problems for our children and grandchildren,” Crowell said.
