NRC Legal Panel Says DOE Can’t Unilaterally Kill Yucca Mountain

In late June a legal panel for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the Department of Energy couldn’t legally take the Yucca Mountain repository off the table without the backing of the entire NRC.

The panel said that as Congress had directed the DOE to file the application and the NRC "issue a final, merits-based decision" on its fate, letting the DOE single-handedly stop the process would be "contrary to congressional intent."

A spokeswoman for the Energy Department, Jenni Lee, said in a statement that the department believes “the administrative board’s decision is wrong.”

The NRC’s chair, Gregory Jaczko, has said that nuclear fuel can be maintained safely at commercial power plant sites for decades, reported the Associated Press.

But the companies currently maintaining those sites find that solution unsatisfactory.

At commercial reactor sites, after spending five years “cooling off” in spent-fuel pools, the highly radioactive material is encased in seventeen feet tall, 150-ton steel-and-concrete casks.

At most sites these casks are then stored above ground, protected by cameras, razor wire and security details. The casks are licensed to contain waste for 20 years, but the NRC is evaluating increasing that license period to 40 years, with the possibility of an additional 20-year extension.

While the makers of the casks say the steel-reinforced concrete is capable of withstanding a direct hit from a commercial jet, many still worry about the safety of storing quantities of nuclear waste in areas where they can be clearly seen and potentially targeted by terrorists.

Nationwide, over 800 casks holding about 14,000 metric tons of radioactive waste are stored on reactor sites, reported the Wall Street Journal. An additional 49,000 metric tons are being held in spent-fuel pools, and nationwide, an additional 2,000 metric tons of new waste are created annually.

Maintaining sites where reactors are no longer operating but spent fuel is being stored is costly, and over 70 utilities have sued the government for its failure to offer the long-term storage solution it promised in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu instructed a blue-ribbon panel to consider various options for nuclear waste management, including fuel reprocessing and the construction of “fast reactors” capable of burning the waste created by conventional reactors. They were simultaneously instructed, however, to not consider Yucca Mountain as a storage option.

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