Nuclear waste management in the United States is not a technical issue but a political one due to differing energy priorities from administration to administration, a panel said Monday at City College of New York in New York, N.Y.
The hybrid panel for “What Now, What Next: Tackling Spent Nuclear Fuel for a Sustainable Future” was made of up Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Collaboration-Based Siting director Marla Morales, Vanderbilt University research engineer Megan Harkema, Orano technical consultant Sven Bader, Oklo director of fuel cycle technologies Christina Leggett, and J Kessler and Associates president John Kessler discussed the future of U.S. nuclear waste management.
Harkema said with the changing of administrations over the years and the changing politics, nuclear waste management has remained stagnant for many years.
Countries such as Finland and Sweden have different political schemes and relationships, which has allowed them to move more cohesively through a collaboration-based approach to repositories, Morales said.
Harkema added that with the larger size of the United States, each state may also carry different views with nuclear energy and its waste storage.
“When you think of a country like Sweden you’re going to have a population that lives within a smaller radius and have similar priorities and values because they are interacting in the same community,” Harkema said. “When you think about the United States and the disparities between California, Texas, southeast, the northeast and all of these different views and opinions, it makes it hard to really pull together the same cohesiveness you see in these other countries.”
According to DOE, there is over 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste stored across the United States. Despite not having a repository yet, the panel agreed that nuclear waste is currently safely stored throughout the country.
Leggett added that 94,000 metric tons is not a lot of waste when considering how long nuclear power has been around in the country.
In the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, Congress ordered DOE to site and construct a permanent repository for high-level radioactive nuclear waste disposal. In the amended act of 1987, Yucca Mountain in Nevada was designated to become a deep geological repository to store that waste.
However, under Barack Obama’s administration plans for Yucca Mountain were canned due to state and federal political pushback.