The Department of Energy should use consent-based siting to find a permanent geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel, Jennifer Granholm, President Biden’s energy secretary nominee, said Wednesday.
The former Michigan governor told Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee at her confirmation hearing that “site-based consensus strategies” are the right way to designate a permanent repository.
“It is a very sticky situation,” said Granholm. “[W]e have to maybe look at what the blue ribbon commission did on this.”
Consent based siting was one of the pillars of the 2012 report by the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, convened by President Barack Obama in 2010. The commission recommended that state, local and tribal representatives agree with the federal government on the site of a proposed repository.
Rod McCullum, senior director of used fuel and decommissioning at the Nuclear Energy Institute, told RadWaste Monitor in a phone interview Thursday that consent-based siting should be “a process” with clear steps that’s designed to build trust and confidence between interested parties.
Meanwhile, the 2012 commission report also called for “a new, single-purpose organization,” maybe a congressionally chartered federal corporation, to help the Department of Energy solve the nuclear waste problem.
In 2019, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and the now-retired Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) filed a bill to create a Nuclear Waste Administration. It was the Senators’ third attempt to create an autonomous rad waste agency, and, like the other two attempts, it went nowhere in Congress.
Granholm said Wednesday that the Biden administration would support efforts by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and the rest of the Nevada delegation to reintroduce consent-based siting legislation.
Granholm reaffirmed Wednesday that the Biden administration opposes building a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., which remains the sole, congressionally authorized site for such a repository. However, she committed to working with Congress to develop a safe alternative to the moribund site — a stance critics of such an idea say only enables the status quo of keeping spent fuel at power plants.
That status quo, defended unfailingly by Cortez-Masto and a long line of Nevada politicians before her, frustrates some in Congress, including King.
“We really need to be honest with ourselves” about the fact the United States has dozens of spent fuel sites scattered across the country, King told Granholm. “And it’s because of a 70-year unmet promise by the federal government to deal with nuclear waste. I hope that’s something that you will pay attention to.”
