Feds hand out $26 million to help find home for nuclear waste

Think of finding a permanent home for nuclear waste as a 10-mile-long race course run by inchworms. Well, we’re here to tell you that the starting gun has sounded and the inchworms have officially set off!

Hey. After decades of paralysis, every millimeter forward is worth noting.

We’ve told you that the U.S. Department of Energy has restarted an effort to enlist communities ready, willing and able to host the nation’s nuclear waste, at least temporarily. That would move the 3.6 million pounds of waste now encased in steel and concrete at San Onofre — and hundreds of millions more pounds of waste stored at scores of nuclear reactors nationwide — to a new, consolidated site (or sites) until a permanent, deep geologic home is found.

This month, the DOE awarded $26 million to 13 nonprofit and university teams to help move things along. Each team will receive about $2 million.

“It is vital that, as DOE works to be good stewards of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel, we do right by communities in the siting process and includes them in the decision-making at the outset,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm in a prepared statement. “This funding will help DOE learn from and involve communities across the country in the consent-based siting process, answer questions and concerns, and develop an understanding so that we are good neighbors even before moving in.”

In the DOE’s $161 billion budget, $26 million is essentially pocket change, but again, it’s something.

“This by itself is an early, small step in a long process,” said David Victor, professor at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, and chair of the San Onofre Community Engagement Panel. “But the experience in the rest of the world is that you need communities to step up — and to do that, they must be informed. This effort may help.”

The awardees will be expected to, in DOE’s words:

• “Organize, lead, and maintain meaningful, inclusive community and stakeholder engagement processes related to nuclear waste management;
• “Elicit and map public values, interests, concerns, and goals to promote and enable effective collaboration and community-driven insights and feedback toward the refinement of a consent-based siting process aimed at siting a potential federal consolidated interim storage facility; and
• “Develop, implement, and report outcomes and strategies that support mutual learning among the U.S. Department of Energy, stakeholders, communities, and experts on nuclear waste-related topics.”

Those with California ties include the nonprofit Good Energy Collective (incorporated in California but formed in Maryland) as the lead, with the University of Notre Dame as partner; New Jersey-based Holtec International, manufacturer of San Onofre’s newest dry storage system, as the lead, with the University of Florida as partner; North Carolina State University as the lead, with the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe of San Luis Obispo County and Region, Mothers for Nuclear and Tribal Consent Based Coalition-Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant as partners; and Southwest Research Institute in Texas as the lead, with Deep Isolation of Berkeley as a partner.

U.S. Rep Mike Levin, D-San Juan Capistrano, brought Secretary of Energy Granholm to San Onofre earlier this month to discuss the awards and next steps. Moving spent nuclear fuel away from San Onofre has been one of Levin’s top priorities since taking office in 2019, he said.

“We all know that keeping spent fuel here long term is unacceptable,” he said with Granholm by his side. “With today’s announcement, the Department of Energy is using the resources and funding I helped secure to take the next step in the consent-based siting process by engaging communities across the country to come up with potential storage sites for spent nuclear fuel.”

Levin credited himself, and Congress, with securing $93 million for the Department of Energy to restart the consent-based siting program. It’s in the first stage of that process, “planning and capacity building,” and is not yet soliciting volunteer communities to host the waste. That will come later.

The DOE has no choice but to solve this radioactive waste disposal problem.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 made the management and permanent disposal of commercial spent nuclear fuel its responsibility. It was supposed to work like this: Customers of the utilities that produced nuclear power paid billions into the DOE’s Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for permanent disposal; and in return, the DOE was supposed to start accepting spent fuel from commercial reactors like San Onofre’s by January 1998.

It didn’t happen. It still hasn’t. Reactor operators, stuck with the stuff, sued the DOE and won. The federal government has forked over more than $9 billion to reactor operators like San Onofre’s principal owner, Southern California Edison, to pay for the temporary storage they’ve had to build while the feds dicker. These costs will continue to grow, the GAO said: While the DOE has estimated the outstanding bill at some $31 billion, others say it’s closer to $50 billion.

That’s paid for by all American taxpayers, including those who’ve already paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund via their electric bills.

Meantime, the Nuclear Waste Fund has some $45 billion sitting in it, earning more than $1 billion in interest every year. That’s after spending more than $10 billion on moribund Yucca Mountain.

The lesson there is not to try to cram nuclear waste down unwilling throats. And one that will be surely be tested as “consent-based siting” progresses. Can we give consent today for people who are not yet born? We’re looking forward to hearing what the awardees conclude on this one.

Source: Orange County Register