Michele Kearney's Nuclear Wire - Major Energy and Environmental News and Commentary affecting the Nuclear Industry. Nuclear Activities
Thursday, April 3, 2025
Board Letter to U.S. Congress and Secretary to Energy - March 18, 2025 - pns001vf-nwtrb-mar2025-letter-report.pdf
Board Letter to U.S. Congress and Secretary to Energy - March 18, 2025 - pns001vf-nwtrb-mar2025-letter-report.pdf
https://www.nwtrb.gov/docs/default-source/correspondence/pns001vf-nwtrb-mar2025-letter-report.pdf?sfvrsn=1c82c205
With No Program to Find a Nuclear Waste Repository Site, Success Is Unlikely
That was the not-too-shocking conclusion of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, established by Congress in 1987 to provide an independent review work by the Department of Energy to disposition defense wastes and spent reactor fuel.
The Department’s program evaluates “hypothetical disposal concepts” but is “without actions to identify one or more specific sites for consideration,” the Board said in a report to Congress. And this “will not alone be sufficient to meet the national responsibility to develop a repository for permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.”
With spent fuel now left behind at a variety of sites where reactors have been decommissioned and removed, the current effort has been focused on finding an “interim” site, where dry casks can be guarded and monitored for the next few decades. The government is currently paying about $800 million a year to store fuel that it had promised to begin accepting for burial by 1999, and that cost could be cut simply by centralizing the casks. But "the lack of an effective repository program brings a high risk that ongoing efforts to site one or more federal interim storage facilities will ultimately be unsuccessful,” the report said.
There are other strong reasons to establish a deep geologic repository. Although dry cask storage has been safe for decades and will be safe for many decades to come, establishing a repository would deprive nuclear opponents of a talking point. And American companies that want to export reactors are at a disadvantage against countries like Russia, which can present a package deal, including fuel supply and fuel take-back.
Sweden, Finland and Canada are all making strong progress towards establishing a repository, but so far the problem in the United States is political deadlock.
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