The Elusive Permanent Repository
Waste accumulates at U.S. nuclear power plants as the process of choosing a site for a geological repository has stalled
A permanent repository is a storage facility located deep underground and engineered for the long-term safe disposal of nuclear waste. Such a repository is needed because spent nuclear fuel remains dangerously radioactive for thousands of years after it is removed from the reactor.
In 1982, the United States Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), which made the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) responsible for siting, building, and operating an underground storage facility for nuclear waste. The DOE studied a number of locations to determine their suitability, until the Congress amended the NWPA in 1987 directing the DOE to study only Yucca Mountain.
The On-Again, Off-Again Yucca Mountain Site
The DOE was supposed to begin accepting fuel at Yucca Mountain in 1998, but that did not occur due to delays that resulted from legal challenges, concerns about transportation of nuclear waste to the facility, and political pressures that led to construction being underfunded. In 2002, President George W. Bush signed a law “[a]pproving the site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, for the development of a repository for the disposal of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel, pursuant to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982[.]”
In 2006, the DOE recommended that Yucca should open and begin accepting fuel by 2017. However, after the 2006 midterm elections, Nevada Senator Harry Reid became the Senate’s majority leader, which put him in a powerful position to block completion of the project. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama promised to abandon the project. After his election in 2010, the DOE filed a motion with the NRC to withdraw its Yucca Mountain license application. A number of lawsuits have been filed in response to the DOE’s action.
The NWPA created a Nuclear Waste Fund that was to fund the repository by requiring reactor operators and their customers to pay a tax on the waste that was produced. As of 2013, the fund contains approximately $29 billion and is set to increase by $1 billion per year. A number of utilities that own nuclear reactors have sued the federal government for breaching its contracts with the companies by failing to open a facility that could accept fuel by 1998 in exchange for collecting the fee. As a result of these lawsuits, the federal government has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to the utilities.
The Blue Ribbon Commission
In 2010, the Obama Administration established the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future (BRC) “to conduct a comprehensive review of policies for managing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, including all alternatives for the storage, processing, and disposal of civilian and defense used nuclear fuel, high-level waste, and materials derived from nuclear activities.” In its final report in 2012, the Commission recommended a “consent‐based” approach to siting future nuclear waste storage and disposal facilities, the creation of a new agency to manage nuclear waste, and immediate work to begin development of at least one geologic repository and one consolidated storage site.
The legislation to implement the BRC’s recommendations has twice been filed in the United States Senate, but neither bill has moved forward.
It will likely take decades before either a repository or interim consolidated storage site is sited and constructed. In the meantime, nuclear waste will continue to accumulate at reactor sites.
