Search for spent-fuel host community can succeed even if it fails, new DOE waste chief says

The Department of Energy’s latest search for a consenting host community for spent nuclear fuel can succeed even if no community consents, the agency’s newly minted nuclear waste chief said in an exclusive interview this week.

“That off ramp is also a success, because we are not wasting resources on unworkable solutions,” Sam Brinton, deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposal in the agency’s Office of Nuclear Energy, told RadWaste Monitor Thursday in a video interview with the Exchange Monitor.

An acceptable outcome of DOE’s consent-based search for a federal interim storage site — which the agency bolstered this year with two new initiatives funded at about $25 million combined — “is a community saying, ‘this does not align with my goals, and I would no longer like to participate,” said Brinton.

Brinton — an openly genderfluid individual whose colorful outfits, machine-gun speaking voice, and high-energy approach to the job are well known in D.C. nuclear-policy circles — only recently joined the DOE’s career ranks to take on a challenge that has bedeviled and hamstrung the nuclear power industry since before Brinton was born: how to get spent fuel away from the power plants that generated it and into safe, permanent storage over the many thousands of years it will take to decay.

DOE’s current attempt to find a place to build a federal interim storage site has focused on the consent-based siting method endorsed by the 2012 Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. The concept was born after the political death of Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., which over the objections of powerful politicians from the state was, and remains, the sole site Congress has authorized by name as a permanent waste repository.

A wrinkle in the whole process is that DOE cannot legally build an interim storage facility until it has built a permanent repository. Another wrinkle, a decade after the Blue Ribbon Commission, is that Brinton and DOE are not saying, just yet, exactly what constitutes consent.

In Brinton’s view though, consent means more than a community simply accepting a proposal that DOE brings, fully formed, to the neighborhood.

Brinton spoke to the Monitor a week after DOE unveiled a roughly $16 million funding opportunity for potential host communities to explore whether they might benefit from becoming neighbors with a federal interim storage site. Late last year, the agency devoted some $10 million to a request for information designed to let potential host communities help the agency define consent.

Awardees under the $16 million cooperative agreement framework will have 18 to 24 months to develop processes for increasing stakeholder engagement on interim storage and create strategies for increasing public knowledge about nuclear waste issues.

Applications for cooperative agreement funding are due Dec. 19.

Editor’s note: the story is an excerpt of the Exchange Monitor’s interview with Brinton, the complete text of which will follow as part of this week’s RadWaste Monitor.