The Department of Energy said it will begin siting “interim” waste storage facilities as part of a plan to spur the use of nuclear power and support the Obama administration’s goal of combating climate change.
Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz made the announcement Tuesday afternoon from the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank in Washington, where he said the agency would begin the siting process for an interim storage test site, before moving on to a full interim facility.
The nuclear waste plan also would include work on a more permanent waste “repository” for the Energy Department’s weapons facilities, but nothing like the permanent waste repository once envisioned at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
“We don’t think Yucca Mountain is workable,” but the administration is working toward the ultimate goal of establishing a permanent waste site for commercial reactor waste, Moniz said.
The plans for a waste repository would be primarily to take care of the department’s obligations to remove the tons of waste building up at the agency’s several weapons facilities. The facilities would not be suitable for taking commercial reactor waste from utilities.
The interim storage facilities would be used to house commercial reactor waste from power plants. The catch is the agency cannot designate or construct a new facility without new authority from Congress, according to Moniz. These sites would be different from the more permanent repository sites for defense waste.
The administration’s main message was that the facilities would be chosen based on a consensus process that takes into account community acceptance.
That approach harkens back to the way Yucca Mountain was chosen without adequate community acceptance. The Obama administration chose to scuttle the project administratively during its first term. Many saw the move as a favor to Harry Reid, then the Senate majority leader and a fervent Yucca opponent from Nevada.
Interim facilities are not as complex as a waste repository housed in a mountain. An interim storage site would be put in a remote area, often proposed as large open paddocks, where waste is shipped and stored in concrete containers called dry casks.
Having the facilities would help to reduce the government’s liability for accruing waste but having no plan to remove and store the radioactive and dangerous material, Moniz said.
It also would help spur the development of small nuclear power plants, which the administration has been bullish on developing as a safer, low-cost alternative to the expensive behemoths of the 1970s and ’80s, according to an Energy Department fact sheet.
“Along with industry, we continue to see a market for [small reactors] to be commercialized and deployed around 2022-2025. The Energy Information Administration projects that by the year 2040 electricity demand in the U.S. will increase by 28 percent. [Small reactors] can help meet the nation’s growing energy demands — including replacing retiring power plants — while providing reliable, affordable low-carbon power,” the fact sheet reads.
