Why US nuclear waste policy got stalled. And what to do about it.

It is often said—somewhat accusingly—that it isn’t technical issues that stand in the way of siting a US geologic repository for highly radioactive waste, but political and social ones. In fact, the issues are inextricably connected. The root of the US failure lies in the original motive of the nuclear establishment in siting such an underground repository. It was not to protect public safety, but to protect continued licensing of nuclear power plants from attack in the courts on grounds that there were no provisions for dealing with the plants’ highly radioactive waste.

The disdain for public safety and the rush to open a repository infected the design process and fostered slapdash decisions. These ultimately sank the technical case for the repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. And while in the end the project was shelved by a political act, behind it were Energy Department and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) actions that left a deep residue of public distrust, so deep that there isn’t likely to be a US geologic repository, ever.

The contrast with successful waste repository projects in Sweden and Finland is clear. Their regulatory standards were much tighter than those applied by the NRC, the sites were chosen carefully from a scientific point of view, and the designs strictly focused on public safety. It is not surprising that the Scandinavian authorities were able to gain the confidence of their public, and not just because they took pains to consult the public—which the Energy Department did not. They presented a good case for a sound underground facility.

Waste become a problem. A deep-underground waste repository wasn’t always the preferred solution for dealing with US high-level waste. Before 1975, when the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was split into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy and Research and Development Administration (ERDA, the forerunner of the Energy Department), the AEC planned to store such waste in an above-ground, so-called “engineered” facility. The new NRC chairman, Bill Anders, a former AEC commissioner, had been spooked by the success of a court challenge to the AEC’s fast breeder project on grounds the commission hadn’t considered the long-term impact of the breeder reactor waste. He was afraid the same argument might stop licensing of conventional power reactors, then (optimistically) projected to soon dominate US electricity generation.

Anders convinced Bob Seamans, the ERDA administrator, to drop the waste storage policy he inherited and adopt deep geological disposal. In 1975, as I was one of the original NRC commissioners, Anders happily told me: “When we put the first fuel assembly underground we can declare victory.” It turned out to be more complicated than that.

The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act set up procedures for choosing sites for geologic repositories. The Energy Department was to select potential sites and design a facility that the NRC would review and decide on a license. The department came up with a list of candidate sites from which President Ronald Reagan chose three: in Texas, Washington, and Nevada. In 1987, Congress narrowed the list to Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. The inside-baseball explanation was that the House speaker, Jim Wright, was from Texas, so that was out, and the Democratic majority leader, Tom Foley, was from Washington, so that was out, too.

Perhaps that was too cynical.

Yucca Mountain appeared to be the cheapest site to develop as drilling would be horizontal, from ground level into the mountain, as opposed to drilling down. Unfortunately, it was a very bad site in terms of resisting corrosion of metal waste canisters. It has an oxidizing (rust promoting) chemical environment when the opposite, a reducing environment, was wanted. And the more the Energy Department learned about the site, the worse it looked.

Selecting a bad site. Yucca Mountain was initially advertised as being very dry. It turned out there was lots more water in the mountain than the Department expected. When I became a consultant for the state of Nevada in 2001, I went down into a test chamber in the heart of the mountain and was surprised by the amount of water dripping on my head. Moreover, rainwater flowed down through the mountain and out to the site boundary much faster than the Energy Department had estimated, at least 10 times faster. It became clear the waste canisters would corrode much more rapidly than forecast and radioactive leakage beyond the site boundary would exceed even the lax standards imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency and adopted by the NRC.

Instead of admitting it had picked a bad site and returning to Congress for instructions on investigating another candidate, as it was required to do by law, the Energy Department invented an ersatz solution to compensate for the inadequate geology: a “drip shield.” Each of the 11,000 waste canisters in the many miles of tunnels would be covered by a 5-ton titanium alloy “mailbox” to shield it from the corrosive water flowing through the Mountain. With these in place, calculations showed that the canister and drip shield combination complied with the EPA and NRC licensing requirements.

In effect, the department was shifting to reliance on metal “engineered barriers,” when the whole point of a using a deep underground repository was to gain the advantage of geologic barriers. If you were going to rely primarily on the metal package, why still bother to put the canisters deep underground?

But there was a catch to this, too, one might even say a fraud was involved.

A flawed licensing process. While the Energy Department wanted credit for the 11,000 drip shields in the NRC review of its license application, it didn’t intend to install them with the waste canisters. For one thing, the cost of the needed 55,000 tons of titanium alloy was substantial, and putting in drip shields would have complicated the waste installation process and required new, as yet undesigned, equipment. Instead, the Energy Department’s plan “postponed” drip shield installation until the repository closed for good, in 100-300 years. But by then it would be impossible to install drip shields over the waste canisters: The internal underground transportation system would not be functioning, and rockfall would anyhow make passage impossible. Asked how the NRC could possibly accept this fantastical commitment, I remember an Energy Department official responding that “the NRC may not question the promise of a sister agency.”

The Energy Department refused to run any computer analyses on how the repository would perform if the drip shields didn’t get installed. Nevada managed to do this and found that, without drip shields, the repository failed the licensing requirement for radioactive leakage from the site. And the failure came early, in around a thousand years after repository closure. The NRC staff should have thrown out the department’s license application at the pre-qualification stage in 2008, but accepted it, rationalizing the Energy Department would address the drip shield issue in the upcoming hearing.

NRC staff participates in all agency licensing hearings. Since at that point staffers had already reviewed the application favorably, they supported the license applicant. In the Yucca Mountain case, the staff outdid itself in its support of the Energy Department. The state of Nevada proposed over 200 issues for litigation before the NRC Licensing Board of three administrative judges; the Energy Department urged the Board to reject every single one of them and the NRC staff agreed in almost every instance. Judge Alan Rosenthal was so shocked at the NRC staffers’ bias that he reprimanded them for being “spear carriers” for the Energy Department. The licensing board rejected the NRC staff position and accepted more than 200 issues for litigation.

Stop the stalemate. The Yucca Mountain project was stalled indefinitely by the Obama administration before any substantive licensing hearing took place. It was not irrelevant that Nevada Senator Harry Reid was the Democratic majority leader, and his former assistant was NRC chairman. But the technical failures were a vital part of the background leading to this decision.

The 2012 report of a “Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future” recommended a “consent-based approach” to managing nuclear waste. The Energy Department got religion and formed an Office of Consent-Based Siting, whose website explains that consent-based siting “prioritizes the participation and needs of people and communities and seeks their willing and informed consent to accept a project in their community.” But the department still didn’t get it. It’s not making a show of consulting the public that gains trust. You need a good technical plan to start with and demonstrated competence and sense of responsibility to carry it out, as was the case in the Scandinavian countries. In my judgment, it’s too late for the Energy Department. I don’t think any state would ever trust the Energy Department to build and operate a nuclear waste repository.

The lack of a repository doesn’t seem to worry nuclear enthusiasts anymore, probably because it doesn’t threaten what reactor licensing there is. Recent legislation—the ADVANCE Act—to accelerate approval of new nuclear technologies does not mention nuclear waste at all. The focus is on subsidizing new reactor projects and “streamlining” licensing.

The United States, however, does need a better system for storing highly radioactive used fuel than the current situation of keeping it at over 80 storage locations in 36 states. A difficulty is that current law requires that, before the Energy Department can go forward with a surface storage facility to consolidate the used fuel, it has to have already selected a new geologic repository site, which isn’t happening. This restriction was inserted into the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to prevent the government from siting a “temporary” storage facility and then giving up on an underground repository for permanent disposal of the waste. Now, because of this restriction, the United States has neither centralized storage nor a repository, and the waste keeps piling up. Relaxing the provision in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act that has prevented temporary consolidated storage has to be the starting point of a sensible nuclear waste policy.