Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials on Wednesday defined the agency’s role in the Department of Energy’s consent-based siting effort for nuclear waste storage, saying the best approach is to monitor the effort’s progress rather than becoming involved in the direction of the program
NRC Spent Fuel Storage and Transportation Director Mark Lombard and Yucca Mountain Directorate chief James Rubenstone appeared Wednesday at The George Washington University with a host of industry and government representatives for Stanford University’s “Reset of U.S. Nuclear Waste Management Strategy and Policy Series.”
Rubenstone said DOE asked NRC if it wanted to participate in the department’s consent-based siting public meetings this year around the country.
“We decided that any advantages of being at the meetings would be kind of washed out by looking like we’re marching shoulder to shoulder with DOE in this process,” Rubenstone said. “We’re certainly interested, and to have NRC there maybe would undermine the independence (of NRC). I think that’s the challenge of the regulator is to show that they are engaged but not in lockstep, or in bed, or whatever metaphor you want to use, with the department.”
Lombard said NRC is “monitoring the meetings” in which DOE is discussing its plan to secure community approval for establishing pilot, interim, and ultimately permanent storage sites for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.
“We’ve really wrestled with what should our role be as an independent agency at those meetings, and we thought the best thing to do is to monitor and see how those go forward, because we don’t have a role in consent-based siting,” Lombard said. “We don’t do policy. We don’t set the national strategy, but our primary responsibility is not to be a barrier to national strategy as it goes forward, as it’s being implemented.”
Eventually NRC will have to decide whether to issue licenses to private companies looking to build and operate interim storage facilities for nuclear waste under the consent-based program. Texas-based Waste Control Specialists has submitted its license application to the NRC for a spent fuel facility in Andrews County, Texas, and Holtec International plans to submit its own for a site in New Mexico.
Michael McMahon, senior vice president and project director for WCS partner AREVA TN, said the company expects to operate the facility for 60 to 100 years. NRC rules allow WCS and Holtec to submit applications for 40-year licenses with 20-year options to renew.
Adam Levin, retired director of spent fuel and decommissioning at power company Exelon, laid out what he thinks is a realistic timeline for when DOE will begin transporting tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste stranded at American reactors. He is eyeing 2028 as the start date. DOE has said priority will be given to closed reactors, and Levin said the department should address each site based on when that plant ceased operation. The Nuclear Energy Institute’s Rod McCullum said Levin’s presentation added “a lot of color” to the conversation, and the sentiment seemed to be that 2028 is not unrealistic.
The DOE siting program as proposed envisions operation of a pilot storage facility by 2021; one or more larger, interim facilities by 2025; and finally at least one permanent geologic repository by 2048.
David Lochbaum, head of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Nuclear Safety Program, said leaving the material in spent fuel storage pools creates undue risk to the public, including sabotage threats from terrorists and natural events such as earthquakes and flooding. Lochbaum claimed that about 75 percent of the nation’s spent fuel is currently stored in wet pools, and 25 percent is in dry-cask storage.
“These spent fuel pools are loaded revolvers pointed at community’s heads,” Lochbaum said. “It’s not enough for the federal government to reimburse the owners for the cost of the bullets. Unload some of the bullets from those guns.”
Every year DOE is forced to pay utilities for damages for its failure to honor waste disposal contracts tied to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. The latest number shows that the federal government has paid about $5.3 billion to date in damages. DOE estimates its remaining liabilities will total $23.7 billion.
