One of the heads of the advisory group overseeing the decommissioning of the Vermont Yankee power plant wants to retract the group’s endorsement to send the plant’s spent fuel to an interim storage facility.
Vice Chair Lissa Weinmann doesn’t believe a letter signed in 2015 by the board’s former chair is representative of the current board’s position on interim storage. Many of the board’s members have changed since 2015, so Weinmann thinks the current board’s consensus could be different.
“My rationale for this, as a panel member, really doesn’t mean that I’m trying to get the panel to take a position on anything,” Weinmann told RadWaste Monitor in a phone call Thursday. “I just feel that there has never been a discussion, nor a vote, and that essentially, people didn’t understand what they were supporting at that time.”
The 2015 letter was approved only by the chair at the time, not the full panel. At the Dec. 7 meeting, current members will draft an opinion outlining their stance on consolidated interim storage. They’ll vote on the matter at a subsequent board meeting.
Weinmann said she believes the waste should only be moved once, to a permanent facility.
“I do think it’s important that host communities like ours understand that it’s fine to say we want to move the waste as expeditiously as possible and get it out of our state. But where is it going? It’s going to someone else’s state,” Weinmann said.
“And in the case of New Mexico, and in Texas, the governors have said ‘We don’t want that facility here.’ And we have heard from local people who’ve said, ‘No, we don’t want that storage facility here’… I mean, it’s here now. We generated it. Until there’s a permanent disposal solution, I don’t see as if it really makes sense for us to be moving it twice at the taxpayer expense. And really, who benefits from that? I don’t think it’s really the nation at large.”
The 2015 letter was sent in conjunction with three other New England-area citizen advisory groups concerned with the decommissioning of the Vermont Yankee power plant.
Weinmann said she thinks people signed it without understanding exactly what interim storage was, and that it would require a change in federal law in order to be implemented.
Weinmann said she would be interested in working with other citizen advisory boards across the country to come to some kind of collective stance on interim storage. She said some advisory board members from Texas attended one of the panel’s last meetings to take part in the discussion, and that it was very helpful.
“I wish that the reactor communities would be more coordinated in their approach to this, because I really do feel that it’s, it’s in the interest of all of the reactor communities who, you know, increasingly are going to be stuck holding the bag with this in our state to really get involved and try to push for a solution,” Weinmann said. “I’m not sure that consolidated interim storage is the best solution.”
