Blue ribbon panel might consider lessons learned from Yucca project

Elaine Hiruo, Washington /908 words/5 April 2010/Nuclear Fuel///NUF/13/Volume 35, Issue 7/English/
(c) 2010 McGraw-Hill, Inc.
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The blue ribbon commission on nuclear waste might be willing to consider lessons learned from the process used by the Yucca Mountain repository project in Nevada, but it will not look at decisions about the site itself, co-chairmen Lee Hamilton and Brent Scowcroft said March 26 after the panel's first two-day meeting ended./
The 15-member commission was established by President Barack Obama's administration to conduct a comprehensive review of waste management alternatives to a Yucca Mountain repository and to make recommendations for a new national policy for managing utility spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste.



The charter of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future is broad, but it doesn't require the commission to recommend specific sites, Scowcroft told reporters after the commission meeting. But Hamilton said there is value in learning from past experiences.



"This is an independent commission," Hamilton said, "and we will draw our own conclusions, develop our own alternatives, make our own recommendations."



Hamilton's comment came a day after Energy Secretary Steven Chu, in his opening remarks to the commission, said the panel should keep its focus on the future and not spend time looking at the past and at the now-scuttled Yucca Mountain project.



Chu called for a broad, integrated review of factors early in the fuel cycle, such as advanced reactor technologies, saying they could affect the waste stream at the back end of the fuel cycle. "One really cannot predict what technologies will be available 50 to 150 years from now," Chu said. But, he added, the commission should review all possible ways to reduce the volume of nuclear waste slated for disposal. The task before the panel, according to Hamilton, is "daunting."



The administration intends to scrap the country's existing policy on nuclear waste that would have required utility spent fuel and DOE highly radioactive defense waste to be disposed of in a repository at Yucca Mountain, some 95 miles outside Las Vegas. DOE filed a motion with an NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board on March 3 to withdraw its Yucca Mountain repository license application with prejudice, a move that if approved could prevent the department from ever resubmitting that application to NRC. That action comes after DOE has spent more than two decades and $10 billion on work associated with a Yucca Mountain repository. It also comes nearly two years after DOE rushed to submit a repository license application to NRC and to move the program forward.



It could be June, however, before the ASLB takes up the DOE motion to withdraw the application. The licensing board has said that it will deal first with the petitions filed with the board seeking intervenor status in the licensing proceeding before considering the DOE motion.



Chu told the panel to review an assortment of waste streams, including low-level waste and highly radioactive defense waste, both of which are on DOE nuclear defense sites around the country. Chu asked that the commission make recommendations on how the department can effectively and efficiently meet its obligations to manage and cleanup this waste.



But he also told the panel it will review the Nuclear Waste Fund, a federal trust fund that now contains $21 billion in ratepayer payments and interest. Congress established the fund in 1982 to bankroll the DOE civilian nuclear waste program. Based on a 1 mill, or one-tenth of a cent, fee charged nuclear utility customers for every kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity sold, waste fee collections currently total more than $770 million a year.



Chu has said the department will continue collecting the waste fee during the development of a new national policy on radioactive waste, noting that money will be needed to implement the commission's recommendations.



Under its charter, the commission is to submit its final report and recommendations to Chu within 24 months. "We would like to finish before the two years expire, but we don't know at this time if we can make it," Hamilton told reporters.



The commission must now develop a work plan that will map out what it will evaluate and how it will do that. Commission member Richard Meserve suggested subcommittees be established and staffed to help the commission gather and digest information. Spent fuel reprocessing, long-term storage, and disposal could be the focus of three separate subcommittees, he said. The number of subcommittees will not necessarily be limited to three.
Others suggestions offered by subcommittee members included having an energy economist on staff and making use of the expertise of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent panel Congress established to provide technical oversight to the DOE civilian nuclear waste program.
During the public comment period March 26, Jack Spencer, a nuclear energy research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, urged the commission to put the Yucca Mountain project back in play, saying the panel should use this time to "recalibrate" DOE's approach.
Nevada, which has fought the Yucca Mountain project for decades, should have more control over the project, Spencer said. He also said that the repository program "has to be rooted in the market place" to be successful. More control should be placed in the hands of the companies that produce the waste, he said. That, according to Spencer, should "highly incentivize" them to find a solution.
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