ECA Update: March 11, 2013
Published: Mon, 03/11/13
Energy Communities Alliance Supports Senate Bill 507 to Establish the Manhattan Project National Historical Park in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico and Hanford, Washington and for other purposes
ECA Press Release March 8, 2013 The Energy Communities Alliance (ECA) is pleased to announce that yesterday Senators Maria Cantwell and Lamar Alexander introduced Senate Bill 507 to establish the Manhattan Project National Historical Park in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Los Alamos, New Mexico and Hanford Washington and for other purposes. Senators Martin Heinrich, Patty Murray and Tom Udall are original cosponsors of the bipartisan Manhattan Project National Historical Park Act. ECA previously testified on a version of this bill that was introduced in the 112th Congress, but did not pass. We are happy to see a new bill introduced that will establish a three-unit National Historical Park in Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Hanford as recommended by the National Park Service Special Resource Study.
In June, ECA Chair Mayor Thomas Beehan from the City of Oak Ridge, TN testified before the Subcommittee on National Parks, Energy and Natural Resources Committee, United States Senate on an old version of this bill. In his oral testimony, Mayor Beehan stressed "all three of our communities are united in our support" for the establishment of a National Historical Park in Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Hanford. Mayor Beehan added that the park "is about giving current and future generations a better understanding of this indisputable turning point in world history. It is easy for those of us who live in the communities of Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and the Tri-Cities to say that the Manhattan Project changed the world...The Manhattan Project is an incredible story that deserves to be preserved and told."
ECA supports five recommendations for legislation establishing a National Historical Park in Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Hanford including:
The ECA Executive Board has also expressed their strong support for the establishment of a National Historical Park at the three sites. Today, ECA Secretary and Mayor of Kennewick, Washington Steve Young said, "We are thrilled to see this step toward making the new National Park a reality. There's no question that the story of the Manhattan Project and the contributions of the men and women who supported it are of high interest to the American public. This creates a real opportunity for our communities to share our collective history while realizing the benefits of the heritage tourism industry a National Park is likely to create."
ECA Immediate Past Chair, Richland Councilmember Bob Thompson stated, "The Historical Park is culmination of a lot of people's hard work both in the communities and nationally. The leadership of our Congressional members and Senators from our sites along with the partnership between U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. National Park Service will make this a reality."
ECA Treasurer, Los Alamos Councilor Fran Berting added, "We are here today because the cities, counties, historical societies, citizens groups, librarians, scientific groups and others have come together from all walks of life to support this national historical park."
ECA Vice Chair, Aiken County Councilman Chuck Smith remarked, "All communities should support this legislation as it teaches the lessons of America and identifies an important moment in our history."
ECA is the non-profit organization of local governments which host, or are adjacent to DOE sites. A full copy of ECA's testimony on the 2012 bill can be found on our website www.energyca.org For further information contact Allison Doman, Deputy Executive Director of ECA at 202-828-2423 or Allison@energyca.org.
Week ahead: Senate tackles bill to fund government
Jeremy Herb, The Hill March 11, 2013 The Senate Appropriations Committee plans to unveil its version of a continuing resolution (CR) on Monday, which would bring Congress one step closer to averting a government shutdown.
The Senate hopes to vote on the plan this week so that the House and Senate can negotiate a final CR before March 27.
The House-passed bill provided the Pentagon with a 2013 appropriations bill, which military leaders say is essential to help them move money around before the sequester cuts. The House bill moved $10.4 billion into the Defense Department's operations and maintenance accounts.
In addition to the Pentagon bill, the legislation also included military construction and Veterans Affairs.
The Senate plans to include the Defense appropriations bills, but it is also adding more federal agencies not in the House plan: funding for the Departments of Commerce, Justice, Agriculture, Homeland Security and science agencies.
There are other key differences between the House and Senate bills. The Senate's plan would give the Obama administration greater flexibility over how it implements this year's $85 billion spending cut due to sequestration.
Rather than give federal agencies blanket authority to pick and choose where to spend money, the bill from Senate Democrats would enhance the "reprogramming authority" of the agencies.
But the Senate bill will avoid what could have been a roadblock by keeping the same $1.043 trillion topline number that the House passed, which is then reduced by sequestration to $984 billion.
That won't be the only budget news next week. Both the House and Senate Budget Committees plan to unveil their 2014 budget plans, which are coming out ahead of the Obama administration's budget request.
If the Senate passes the budget resolution from Senate Budget Chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.), it would be the first time for the Senate since 2009.
The Senate Intelligence Committee is holding its annual worldwide threats hearing, where intelligence leaders testify in an open setting.
Newly minted CIA chief John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director Robert Mueller, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen and Assistance Secretary of State for Intelligence Philip Goldberg are all testifying.
In the Senate Armed Services Committee, U.S. Cyber Command chief Gen. Keith Alexander and Strategic Command chief Gen. Robert Kehler will appear Tuesday to talk about the budget and policy issues.
On the House side, the Armed Services Committee is holding four hearings next week, including a look at cyber issues Tuesday and a hearing on whether restarting the ever-popular base closing committee is appropriate at this time.
Numerous top Pentagon officials and defense-minded lawmakers will be speaking on Tuesday at the Newseum for the annual McAleese-Credit Suisse conference.
The speakers include Deputy Defense Secretary Ash Carter, Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Senate appropriators eye omnibus approach for CR John T. Bennett, Federal Times March 7, 2013 "I've been talking with Sen. Mikulski about whether it's possible to put more of the regular appropriations bills on it," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told reporters Thursday, referring to panel Chairwoman Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md.
"We in the Senate have done our work on the appropriations bills, with one exception, and I don't think it makes sense to throw that work out the window," Collins said.
Asked whether a mini-omnibus or full omnibus -- meaning a bill that would couple together multiple full-year agency spending bills into a single measure -- could pass the House, Collins replied: "I don't know whether it would or not."
Minutes later, Mikulski happened upon the same group of reporters carrying a purple folder with a proposed plan for the Senate's version of continuing resolution (CR) legislation. She was preparing to present it to her Democratic caucus.
The House on Wednesday passed its version of the legislation, a $982 billion measure that includes a full $518.1 billion Pentagon 2013 appropriations bill. The House measure also has attached full-year military construction and Department of Veterans Affairs funding bills.
"As you can see, I have a slim proposal," Mikulski said, holding up the glossy folder.
The new Appropriations Committee chairwoman declined to discuss specifics until that presentation was complete. But she offered a window into the plan.
"We appreciate what the House did. We consider it a good first step. But it can't be the only step. The [final CR] has to include some domestic bills ... that will present no major controversies that haven't been vetted before.
"I understand: No poison pill riders. No cute little gimmicks," Mikulski said.
She signaled the emerging Senate mini-omnibus would include a full 2013 defense appropriations act.
Mikulski said the upper chamber's bill will focus on "good funding levels" that includes "meeting the needs of our national security."
Several members of the deficit-reduction and spending-cut focused House GOP caucus said earlier this week that if the Senate sends back a mini-omnibus appropriations bill they would at least take a look and consider supporting it.
But, those GOP members made clear, it must abide by spending caps first set in 2011 and meet all requirements of the defense and domestic sequester cuts that were triggered last Friday.
If too many House Republicans reject the Senate bill, and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, opts against allowing Democratic support to carry it to approval later this month, the government likely would shut down. The current CR expires March 27.
The Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to take up the Democratic-crafted plan as soon as next week.
Obama budget delayed until April Jeremy Herb, The Hill March 8, 2013 The Obama administration will release its 2014 budget more than two months late on April 8, according to congressional sources.
Pentagon officials have informed the House Armed Services Committee that the budget is coming on April 8, said Claude Chafin, a committee spokesman. A Democratic congressional source confirmed that is the planned release date.
The April release means President Obama's budget will be nine weeks late, as it was due by law on Feb. 4, the first Monday in February.
Republicans have slammed Obama for delaying the budget since the first missed deadline.
"I'm disappointed the president has missed his deadline. But I'm not surprised," House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in a statement last month. "In four of the last five years, he's failed to submit his budget on time."
Congressional sources said last week that they had been told the budget was coming on March 25, meaning the latest April 8 release date would be yet another delay.
Under the law, the president must submit a budget by the first Monday in February, but Obama has met the deadline only once. The administration's budget typically kicks off the annual budgeting process, as Congress then shapes its budget resolution on the president's request.
But this year that process is reversed, as both Ryan and Senate Budget Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) are planning to release their 2014 budgets next week.
The House and Senate Armed Services Committees started their 2014 budget hearings with military officials this week without a budget.
The White House has said the delay is due to the budget uncertainty that surrounded the fiscal cliff, sequestration and the continuing resolution that expires March 27.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, blasted the administration last week when it appeared the budget would come at the end of March.
"He will be submitting it after the House and Senate have produced a budget proposal and adjourned for Easter. So while the President speaks of his deep concern for American workers and families, he fails to even submit to Congress his financial plan to help those workers and families," Sessions said.
U.S. NWTRB April Meeting at Hanford to Focus on Waste Form and Disposal Issues U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board March 8, 2013 The U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board will hold an open public meeting in Richland, Washington, on Tuesday, April 16, 2013, to review information on U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) activities related to vitrifying high-level radioactive waste (HLW) stored at the Hanford facility in preparation for eventual disposal in a deep geologic repository. State, local, and regional public organizations have been invited to provide their perspectives on the most important technical issues associated with disposal of wastes from the Hanford site. Also discussed will be the Administration's recent response to recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future and DOE's work related to the potential direct disposal in a deep geologic repository of existing SNF storage containers used at commercial nuclear utility sites.
The Board is a completely independent agency in the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. The Board was created in the 1987 Amendments to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) to conduct an ongoing and objective evaluation of the technical and scientific validity of DOE activities related to implementing the NWPA, including transporting, packaging, and disposing of SNF and HLW. The 1987 Act directs the Board to report its findings, conclusions, and recommendations to Congress and the Secretary of Energy. The Board's statutorily established technical purview does not include the safety or operations of DOE-owned facilities or the management or disposal of low-level radioactive waste. The Board's technical and scientific review of DOE activities at the Hanford facility is focused primarily on the vitrified waste form, which eventually will require disposal in a deep geologic repository.
The Board meeting will be held at the Marriott Courtyard, 480 Columbia Point Drive, Richland, WA 99352; Tel 509-942-9400, Fax 509-942-9401. A block of rooms has been reserved at the Marriott Courtyard for meeting attendees. Reservations can be made online at http://cwp.marriott.com/psccy/technicalreviewboard. Reservations must be made by March 22, 2013 to ensure receiving the meeting rate. The reservation Group Name is "U.S. Nuclear Waste;" the Group Code is NWRG.
The U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board will hold an open public meeting in Richland, Washington, on Tuesday, April 16, 2013, to review information on U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) activities related to vitrifying high-level radioactive waste (HLW) stored at the Hanford facility in preparation for eventual disposal in a deep geologic repository. State, local, and regional public organizations have been invited to provide their perspectives on the most important technical issues associated with disposal of wastes from the Hanford site. Also discussed will be the Administration's recent response to recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future and DOE's work related to the potential direct disposal in a deep geologic repository of existing SNF storage containers used at commercial nuclear utility sites.
The Board is a completely independent agency in the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. The Board was created in the 1987 Amendments to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) to conduct an ongoing and objective evaluation of the technical and scientific validity of DOE activities related to implementing the NWPA, including transporting, packaging, and disposing of SNF and HLW. The 1987 Act directs the Board to report its findings, conclusions, and recommendations to Congress and the Secretary of Energy. The Board's statutorily established technical purview does not include the safety or operations of DOE-owned facilities or the management or disposal of low-level radioactive waste. The Board's technical and scientific review of DOE activities at the Hanford facility is focused primarily on the vitrified waste form, which eventually will require disposal in a deep geologic repository.
The Board meeting will be held at the Marriott Courtyard, 480 Columbia Point Drive, Richland, WA 99352; Tel 509-942-9400, Fax 509-942-9401. A block of rooms has been reserved at the Marriott Courtyard for meeting attendees. Reservations can be made online at http://cwp.marriott.com/psccy/technicalreviewboard. Reservations must be made by March 22, 2013 to ensure receiving the meeting rate. The reservation Group Name is "U.S. Nuclear Waste;" the Group Code is NWRG.
Looming Cuts Add to Problems at Nuclear Site Kirk Johnson, The New York Times March 7, 2013 For the nation's largest environmental cleanup project, a legacy of World War II and the cold war, the announcement last month of six newly confirmed leaking tanks of radioactive waste was added evidence that even after decades of work and billions of dollars in taxpayer sacrifice, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation's risks remain unresolved.
But as Washington's new governor, Jay Inslee, swept onto the site on Wednesday for a hard-hat tour and a briefing, and federal officials warned of layoffs from budget cuts rippling through the federal Department of Energy, the reminder was equally clear, state and federal officials said, that government has always been the real defining force at this place.
Nature might, in the end, bat last at Hanford, in deciding whether the land can ever be healed, but in the meantime government policy and spending decisions are running the bases.
"I'm very disturbed that at the very month that we have six new leaking tanks of radioactive material, the sequestration hits, which could result in the furlough of several thousand people," said Mr. Inslee, a Democrat and a former congressman.
The federal Department of Energy said this week that up to 4,800 workers out of Hanford's 9,000-person work force, mostly employed by private contractors, could be hit with furloughs or layoffs starting April 1. About 1,200 workers were already laid off from late 2011 to January 2013 -- unrelated to the mandatory budget cuts known as the sequester -- as technical problems slowed down construction of a $12.3 billion waste processing plant at the site. Those cuts have already rippled through the local economy.
"It's nasty," said Joan Nelson, 72, the owner of Rosy's Ice Cream and Diner, a breakfast and lunch spot in Richland, where employee hours have been cut as residents stopped going out to eat as much. Ms. Nelson -- she named the place for a doll she and her sisters shared growing up -- said Richland has always swung in its ups and downs with the vicissitudes of the federal check. The city was essentially built from scratch as a federal company town for Hanford workers starting in 1943.
"It's a roller coaster," she said.
Her husband, David -- in a typical example of the web connecting the town and the vast federal works outside it -- is an electrical engineer at Hanford.
Federal cleanup managers, in interviews with reporters who were invited to the site for Mr. Inslee's walkabout, emphasized that the new leaks pose no public health threat to Richland or anywhere else. The amounts are small, less than three gallons a day from the six newly identified leakers, and are far from any underground or surface water that might be contaminated, including the Columbia River itself, they said.
But the uncertainties in financial terms, about how things might proceed from here, and with what tools, are genuine and grave, they said.
"We've got a lot of risks out there -- sequestration is one of them," said Tom Fletcher, who administers Hanford's 177 tanks of radioactive waste as the assistant manager of tank farms at the Department of Energy's Office of River Protection.
Mr. Inslee, who has declared a "zero tolerance policy," as regards environmental threats at Hanford -- and the federal government's decades-old promise to fix what it broke on the land -- said he would be unrelenting in keeping the pressure on.
He applauded a decision this week by the Department of Energy to accelerate proposals to send some lower-level nuclear waste -- including material from five of the leaking tanks -- to a repository in New Mexico. But those plans also face hurdles in approvals and technical details, and are years into the future in any event, Mr. Inslee conceded, which means the leaks will continue.
That federal spending could retreat even as the need for its continuation is underscored by new leaks, Mr. Inslee said, is the real threat at Hanford.
"Not only will it slow down this process, which we have been waiting decades to get done, but it will also make it more expensive for the taxpayers in the long run," he said, referring to the job cuts. "So this is extremely discouraging news that the Congress has not been able to solve this problem."
No one doubts that the cleanup of Hanford -- in scale and technical challenge, and therefore, cost -- is anything but daunting. Nine nuclear reactors, producing plutonium for bombs -- from the one that exploded over Nagasaki in 1945, to the ballistic missile stockpiles of the 1950s through the '80s -- created waste that piled up year upon year to a total of about 56 million gallons' worth. About one million gallons of that is believed to have leaked over time from 67 of the 149 single-shell storage tanks at the 586-square-mile site.
Part of the problem that has nagged construction of a treatment plant -- which would fuse the waste with glass into stable, storable logs for long-term burial, a process called vitrification -- is knowing with certainty the composition of the waste that might flow through pipelines from the tanks.
That led to a halt of construction last year at one of the four giant structures, called the pretreatment building, until technical questions could be resolved, said Todd A. Nelson, a spokesman for the lead contractor at the plant construction site, Bechtel National. Work was also reduced on one other building, he said, pending resolution of technical questions and completion of design.
Those kinds of problems have been Hanford's chronic pattern, said Tom Carpenter, the executive director of Hanford Challenge, a Seattle-based watchdog group that has represented whistle-blowers at the site.
"What you end up with is a system that's very good at spending money," he said.
And wasting it: On Thursday, a Colorado company called CH2M Hill Hanford Group and its parent company, a contractor in managing the waste tanks, agreed to pay $18.5 million to settle civil and criminal federal allegations of timecard fraud in billing for years of inflated overtime, the Justice Department said.
LANL's local spending falls by a third in 2012 Kevin Robinson-Avila, ABQ Journal March 4, 2013 Los Alamos National Laboratory bought $356 million in goods and services from New Mexico companies in fiscal year 2012, but overall, lab procurements from local firms dropped by a third compared to FY 2011.
That has triggered more than 800 layoffs among 32 companies that currently hold LANL contracts of $5 million or more, said Liddie Martinez, director of the community and economic development division of SOC Los Alamos, which manages lab security. And, with more spending cutbacks looming because of federal budget reductions, contractors expect layoffs to increase in the coming months.
"If you have a $5 million-plus contract, it doesn't mean that you're making all that, because you have to get 'task orders' from the lab to draw on it," Martinez said.
"With continued cutbacks in procurements, task orders will become more rare. That will impact all contractors, and it will trickle down to the companies that we subcontract as well."
Overall, lab spending on goods and services fell from $917.9 million to $635 million in the last two years.
New Mexico's portion of those procurements held steady at about 56 percent of total purchases. But actual spending on local contracts fell from $528 million to $356 million.
During the first three months of FY 2013, from October to December, total lab procurements fell by another 10.4 percent, from $151.3 million to $135.6 million.
The procurement declines are unrelated to "sequestration," which refers to automatic federal budget reductions that legally took effect on March 1. Rather, the lab slowed its procurements and initiated a voluntary employee separation program to prepare for the probability of budget cuts, with or without sequestration, said LANL spokesman Steve Sandoval.
"We told people who have (or seek) contracts with the lab that we were in cost-savings mode, and that's clearly reflected in the procurement numbers," Sandoval said.
The voluntary separation program reduced the lab's direct workforce by 557 people last year. But LANL, which had a $2.1 billion budget in FY 2012, continues as northern New Mexico's largest employer, with 9,550 workers.
LANL spending has a big impact on the state economy in general, with $2.5 billion of the lab's total $4.7 billion in procurements since FY 2007 flowing to New Mexico businesses.
The impact, however, is particularly large for northern New Mexico, where local businesses received 71 percent of all of LANL's state procurements last year. And, most of those purchases benefit small businesses, which accounted for about 65 percent of lab spending in FY 2012.
Given the lab's economic importance in the north, eight cities, counties and pueblos formed a Regional Coalition of LANL Communities in 2011 to make their concerns known at the federal level, said Santa Fe Mayor David Coss, who chairs the coalition.
"We're very concerned about sequestration and the ups and downs of LANL's budget," Coss said. "Continued instability in our federal budget has a ripple effect that is felt from Taos to Española to Santa Fe."
On a brighter note, LANL continues to spend about $1 million annually on programs to help northern businesses grow their revenue and workforce, including a new Native American Venture Acceleration Fund that the lab created last fall. The fund awarded nearly $90,000 to six tribal businesses in February.
Meanwhile, Sandia National Laboratories had a slightly larger impact than LANL last year on New Mexico businesses seeking procurement contracts. Sandia spent $400 million on goods and services from local firms in FY 2012, up from about $387 million in FY 2011.
Two years after Fukushima, regulators say U.S. nuke plants are safer Ben Goad, The Hill March 11, 2013 On the second anniversary of the worst meltdown since Chernobyl, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) says the United States' fleet of reactors is safer than ever before, The Associated Press reports.
U.S. lawmakers have repeatedly questioned the NRC in recent weeks about progress toward enacting safety upgrades at the nation's 104 reactors. Late last week, documents released by the NRC raised fresh questions about safety procedures at the long troubled San Onofre power plant in Southern California.
Also in recent days, Sen. Barbara Boxer requested a progress report from the NRC. Boxer, chairman of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public works, is planning her eighth hearing on the topic later this month.
Financial Times is reporting that the Securities and Exchange Commissions is delving into distribution payments from U.S. mutual funds.
In D.C., federal workers are set to rally on Capitol Hill this week against the federal sequester cuts threatening hundreds of thousands of employee furloughs, The Washington Post reports.
The meat industry - already imperiled by the sequester - is lashing back against the Obama administration following the release of new proposed labeling regulations.
Op-ed: States must be involved in finding a repository for Hanford's nuclear waste William Alley and Rosemarie Alley, Special to The Seattle Times March 9, 2013 THE leaking tanks at Hanford are yet another reminder of the inability of the United States to properly dispose of its most dangerous nuclear waste. The legacy includes some 100 million gallons of defense waste from the nuclear-weapons program and 70,000 tons (and growing) of spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors. Hanford has the lion's share of the defense waste, with enough liquid waste to fill the tanker cars of a train 26 miles long.
The plan to eventually solidify Hanford's waste would allow for the highly radioactive part to be buried in a geologic repository. But none exists.
After decades of work and more than $15 billion, President Obama pulled the plug on the nation's only proposed repository for the nation's most dangerous waste, commonly referred to as high-level waste, at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The decision was blatant political payoff to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
It's time to take a new approach to finding a place to store the nation's high-level nuclear waste, and it must meaningfully involve the states.
Meanwhile, the 8,600-page license application for a Yucca Mountain repository languishes in political and legal limbo. In a standoff with the U.S. Court of Appeals, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission claims lack of funds to review the application.
Last year, the Obama administration announced a new plan for what to do with the spent fuel and its high-level defense waste now scattered across 121 sites in 39 states. Start over with a "consent-based approach," seeking interim storage sites in the short term and building a permanent repository by 2048.
In other words, instead of the federal government's "don't ask, just tell policy," look for willing communities. But will it work?
The volunteer approach has been tried several times for an interim storage site. A few communities and Native American tribes stepped forward. In each case, the state shut it down.
Then there's Nye County, Nev., home of Yucca Mountain. When the administration first announced the consent-based plan, Nye County officials notified former U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu of their consent to host the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain. Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval quickly informed Secretary Chu that the state will never consent to a repository.
The well-known problem of NIMBY, or Not in My Backyard, is clearly at play in finding a suitable repository site, yet the more intractable problem is NIMS, Not in My State. With the power to regulate lands, highways and water, states can be formidable opponents. Despite this, the new consent-based plan barely mentions the role of states.
States need a strong role in the decision-making process if they are to assume the high-level nuclear-waste burden for the entire country. Moreover, the entire state must see the benefits that hosting a repository would bring, including new research facilities, improved highways and new sources of revenue.
The success of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the world's only deep repository for long-lived (but less radioactive) nuclear waste, provides a case in point. The state lobbied for and was eventually given a substantive role in decision making and large improvements were made to the state highway system to facilitate safe transport of the waste. An independent technical oversight group that looked out for the public's interest was another key element to help address issues of fear and mistrust.
A similar process at Yucca Mountain or a new site that involves the states could mean progressing from the current stalemate to the safer storage of our planet's most dangerous substances.
Meanwhile, in direct contradiction to the new consent-based approach, federal officials said Wednesday the government plans to ship 3 million gallons of radioactive waste from Washington state to New Mexico. New Mexico officials responded that accepting high-level waste from Hanford would require strong justification and public input.
There are also lessons to be learned from Yucca Mountain. The United States is the only country in the world to have set a firm deadline, Jan. 31, 1998, for opening a repository for its high-level nuclear waste, and is among the few countries to rely so heavily on a single site. Both of these factors led to the perception that meeting deadlines was more important than thoughtful deliberation.
Yucca Mountain has a volunteer community, and possibly a suitable site. Yet, Nevada has a legitimate concern that it was singled out through backroom political maneuvering. With so much invested, Yucca Mountain should remain an option, as others are sought. The tactics must change, however, with an open-ended dialogue addressing Nevadans' concerns and focusing on the benefits the entire state will reap.
There are no guarantees of a successful outcome and this will be neither an easy nor short-term solution, but neither will be finding another site. Any repository site requires decades of study to judge its suitability for long-term waste isolation.
As a result, there's the immense challenge of staying the course over multiple administrations with a complex and politically sensitive program.
As the ongoing legal battles over Yucca Mountain play out, one thing is clear -- trying to solve our nuclear-waste dilemma, while continuing to ignore the power of Not in My State opposition, is just setting us up for the next failure. In such a case, Hanford's high-level waste could be stranded for a long, long time to come.
William Alley, left, oversaw the U.S. Geological Survey studies of Yucca Mountain from 2002 to 2010. He and Rosemarie Alley are the authors of "Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste."
How to Get a Community to Accept Nuclear Waste Bruce Barcott, Pacific Standard March 11, 2013 But as it turns out, they're not the real problem. What keeps safety officials up at night are Fukushima's spent fuel rods.
Fuel rods are 14-foot-long metal tubes about the diameter of a pencil that hold stacked pellets of enriched uranium. When bundled into groups of 100 to 500, the rods throw off enough heat to run electricity-producing turbines for one to two years. After that, the heat from the rods begins to dissipate and they're replaced. Though too cool to generate power, those used bundles of energy are still radioactive--they remain radioactive for about 250,000 years--and they have to be put somewhere.
Utilities generally store spent fuel on site, in massive cooling pools of water for about five years. At that point they have cooled enough to be put in "dry cask" temporary storage tanks--essentially steel pods encased in concrete.
Japan had long tried to establish a permanent storage program for the nation's spent fuel, to no avail. At Fukushima there were thousands of rods in six pools--a pool for each each reactor--plus an overflow facility. On March 11, when the tsunami killed the diesel generators, circulation in the cooling pools at Fukushima stopped. The explosions at the three reactors sent metal debris into the pools, weakening the pool structures themselves. If just one of the plant's spent fuel pools collapses, the rods will heat quickly in the open air and could catch fire, releasing deadly plumes of radioactive cesium. For the past two years, the pools have been cooled using water from hoses. Officials don't expect to begin relocating the spent fuel rods to a safer facility for at least another year, because the machinery used to move the rods was also destroyed in the tsunami.
"As complicated as, say, finding a home for paroled sex offenders."
The United States is Japan before the tsunami. Currently the nation's 30 million spent fuel rods are stored at 77 temporary sites in 35 states, each a Fukushima awaiting its own form of a tsunami. Every site has a unique set of vulnerabilities: earthquakes in California, superstorms along the Atlantic Coast, the danger of terrorist attack.
The national stockpile stands at 69,000 metric tons. Every year another 2,000 tons of spent fuel is added to the total. About 25 percent of the nation's spent fuel is currently in dry-cask storage pods, which are usually stored on-site at the atomic power plants. The rest is held in pools like those at Fukushima. "The utilities need to get rid of the waste they're storing on site," says John Bewick, a nuclear industry consultant and former secretary of environmental affairs for the state of Massachusetts. "Many of them have exhausted the capacity of their pools."
Alarmed by Fukushima, a coalition of environmental groups last year sued the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over the safety of America's spent fuel pools. They focused on one plant in particular, the Indian Point power plant 38 miles north of New York City, which holds more than 1,300 spent fuel assemblies in cooling pools. In June 2012, a federal appeals court ruled that indefinite spent fuel storage at Indian Point--and all other U.S. nuclear plants--was no longer acceptable. The ruling is expected to force the Obama Administration to implement a plan to move those fuel rods away from the power plants, and to a more long-term storage site or sites.
We once had a plan for that: deposit all our high-level nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, a deep geological repository in the Nevada desert. President Obama cancelled that project early in 2010. Obama's re-election permanently sealed Yucca's fate.
Which leaves us nearly back at square one.
After scuttling Yucca, Obama appointed a Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Waste to figure out what to do. Their report can be summed up in a phrase: open two temporary repositories while we look for a better long-term graveyard. "Temporary," in this case, means up to one hundred years.
But who wants the hot waste? This is as complicated as, say, finding a home for paroled sex offenders. Social scientists call it a NIMBY ("not in my back yard") problem and with its whiff of doomsday, complex science, and stigma, nuclear waste storage might be the mother of all NIMBY problems.
"It was a lousy understanding of politics, behavior, and society."
Various people in Congress have accused Obama of politicizing the question of nuclear waste by killing Yucca. Which is typical: for years, politicians have tried to treat nuclear waste disposal as a purely scientific problem, if only because the politics of the issue are so arduous. Yucca boosters loved saying that unbiased "science" had arrived at the best (and, it was implied, maybe the only) answer to the problem, and this in turn had the welcome effect of reducing the politics to a Hobson's choice. Yucca was "the Most Studied Real Estate on the Planet," as the description often went, and if it happened to sit in Nevadans' back yard, well, they just had to deal. (In the Silver State, the congressional act that created Yucca was derided as the "screw Nevada" deal.) There's an implicit assumption that someone's hand has to be forced.
Last June, at a congressional hearing about the defunding of the Yucca project, U.S. Assistant Energy Secretary Pete Lyons said the administration's decision to shelve Yucca came down to a "question of social, public acceptance." Unsurprisingly, members of Congress again pounced at this "politicization" of the issue. "And this would be welcomed as rosewater in the rest of the United States?" asked a cynical Jay Inslee, then a House Democrat representing Washington state. "What evidence do you have that there's any more socially acceptable place?"
But it was politics, not science, that led us to study Yucca in the first place (rather than other potential sites that at the time sat in states with more powerful representatives in Congress). And it was a lousy understanding of politics, behavior, and society that sent us back to the drawing board. The Blue Ribbon Commission confirmed as much: "Any attempt to force a top-down, federally mandated solution over the objections of a state or community" is likely to be expensive, time-consuming, and ultimately unsuccessful.
The bad news is that we have failed. The collective problem of permanent nuclear waste disposal has rolled back down to the bottom of the hill. As a result, fuel rods are still sitting around in pools across the country. The good news is that, since the last time we starting trying to set up a permanent high-level nuclear waste dump, we've learned something.
And while our national track record storing nuclear waste has mostly consisted of failures, it does include a few success stories. There are towns in the United States where people live who are proud of their nuclear waste repositories-- Carlsbad, New Mexico; Andrews, Texas. Both research and experience suggest that there are probably people and places out there who would be willing to shoulder this collective burden; maybe it's just that we haven't been asking them in the right way.
"A cash transaction recast them as desperate scroungers selling their own blood."
Michael O'Hare, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, has studied NIMBY problems for more than thirty years. "There's no magic bullet here," O'Hare says. He has no illusions about how hard it will be to find the next generation of nuclear waste repositories. The unspoken assumption here is worth speaking: "The project has to be sensible. That's step one. The science must be solid, you have to have the right geology and technology."
And there are towns in this country where the geology and technology is right. It's tempting to stereotype the sort of town that accepts a nuclear waste dump--to imagine a place so desperate for jobs and business that it will do anything to bring them home. But experience shows that waste disposal firms that treat any such town as desperate do so at their own peril. Even the most down-on-its-luck burg has its dignity, and balks when that dignity is affronted.
"There's a big difference between an outsider coming to your town imposing a NIMBY project on you, versus you finding a way to create value for the rest of the world and being rewarded for it," O'Hare tells me. O'Hare has a central piece of advice: local buy-in works best when locals aren't forced to rely on information from biased sources. "Give local communities funds to do their own scientific research," he says. "Tell them, 'Here's a budget, here's a list of geology professors. Get your own information. Get your own experts. See what they say.'" Many of these lessons are pretty basic: transparency is good; forcing something upon people is bad).
One idea, though, that has emerged from recent NIMBY research is surprising. The idea has to do with money, altruism, and compensation--and it derives from an old idea about blood donors.
In 1970, the British sociologist Richard Titmuss published a comparative study of blood donation systems in United Kingdom and the United States. In America, 30 percent of the national blood supply came from paid donors. The U.K. depended entirely on unpaid volunteers. Classic economic theory held that offering cash to donors would make the system more efficient and increase supply. In Titmuss's analysis, it did the opposite. Most blood donors, he found, acted out of a sense of altruism. If they were unpaid, they considered themselves generous civic-minded individuals. A cash transaction, however, recast them as desperate scroungers selling their own blood for a few coins. Monetary compensation "crowded out" the finer motivations and resulted in fewer blood donors.
Titmuss's book, "The Gift Relationship," was assailed by economists, but it brought about a global shift in blood policy, including in the U.S. Titmuss died in 1973, before he could expand on his initial research with additional empirical work. Since then, and especially in recent years, his ideas have been taken up and tested by a smattering of social scientists.
In 1993, two Swiss economists tested Titmuss's theory of "crowding out" in a new context: nuclear waste facilities. That year, the Swiss government had proposed building two nuclear waste repositories in two separate towns. One would hold low- and medium-level radioactive waste; the other, long-living highly radioactive waste. Bruno Frey and Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Zurich's Institute for Empirical Economic Research conducted interviews with two-thirds of the households in those communities.
In the proposed low-medium waste site, 50.8 percent of the people said they would be willing to accept the repository in their town. In the high-level waste site, 41 percent indicated they would accept it.
Then Frey and Oberholzer-Gee asked the same respondents if they would accept the same nuclear waste dump if the government included an annual compensation payment ranging from $2,175 to $6,525 per person. Support for the waste facilities collapsed.
In the proposed low- and medium-level waste town, acceptance dropped from 50.8 percent to 24.6 percent. In the proposed high-level waste site, it moved from 41 percent to 27.4 percent. "About one-quarter of the respondents seem to reject the facility simply because of the compensation," the economists noted.
In fact, when offered a higher figure (as much as $8,700 a year), Frey and Oberholzer-Gee found that "only a single respondent who declined the first compensation was now prepared to accept the higher offer." The Swiss citizens weren't looking for a better price point. They saw their patriotic offer--bearing a risk for the good of the nation--reduced to a dirty cash-for-trash scheme, and they balked.
The introduction of money reframes the exchange, says Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at MIT's Sloan School of Management. "Imagine what would happen if a stranger asked you to help them carry a sofa," Ariely says. "You might do it to be a helpful person. But if that same stranger offers you two dollars, all of a sudden your desire goes down. Money doesn't add to your motivation, it substitutes. The social motivation leaves, crowded out by the monetary incentive." Once a situation is recast as a monetary exchange, in fact, there seems to be an insult boundary, a payment level below which a person would feel a loss of self-respect.
"With an issue like this, explicit cash payments make people very uncomfortable," says Michael O'Hare. "They feel that this is not the kind of thing that ought to be traded in money." When people consider a NIMBY project, whether it's an airport, a prison, or a nuclear waste site, they impute a moral content to their behavior. Compensation sullies their motivation. "Crudely caricatured," he wrote in a recent report, "a compensation offer can appear to ask, 'How much do we have to pay you to give your children cancer?'"
Towns that entertain the thought of a nearby nuclear waste dump often have an economic rationale for doing so, but they're also wary of being bought off. The key, O'Hare said, is to find indirect ways of compensating the local community that builds on a sense of pride in the facility.
"Why store nuclear waste in salt?"
"Watch your step." The elevator door rolled open with a clank. John VandeKraats led our party into a cavern as spacious as a church while 2,150 feet above us, the sun pounded the 107-degree desert. In the mine a cool 75-degree breeze brushed our skin, guided by miles of air ducts and fans. Our headlamp beams made the opaque walls looks like dirty ice. VandeKraats guided us to Room 6 at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
WIPP, as it's known in nuclear circles, is a mine dug a half-mile deep into a 2,000-foot layer of rock salt in a remote stretch of the Chihuahua Desert.
WIPP doesn't accept high-level waste or spent fuel rods. It was built to contain the relatively low-level radioactive clothing, tools, pipes, rags, debris, concrete, and dirt contaminated with plutonium at military bomb building facilities like Rocky Flats, Colo., and Savannah River, South Carolina. The waste gets sealed in 55-gallon drums and loaded into special shipping packages--they look like big septic tanks--and trucked to WIPP. VandeKraats and his colleagues are essentially America's Cold War cleanup crew. They are very good at what they do. In the nuclear waste industry, WIPP is considered the gold standard. The Blue Ribbon Commission Report often refers to the New Mexico facility as the kind of operation that should be used as a blueprint for future radioactive waste repositories.
WIPP's Room 6 is a hangar-like space exactly as long as a football field--300 feet--and about two-thirds as wide. It's half filled with hundreds of black 55-gallon drums piled all the way to the room's 13-foot ceiling. In its current configuration, WIPP's capacity tops out at 6.2 million cubic feet of waste. After 13 years in operation, it's almost half full.
About 96 percent of WIPP's waste is low-level stuff that can be handled by workers wearing normal work wear. The rest is hotter stuff, but still not fuel-rod hot, and it's not kept in open rooms. Instead, small horizontal tunnels are bored into the walls of these same repository rooms and 55-gallon drums full of this "remote handled" (RH) waste are shoved into them like torpedoes into a firing chamber. A five-foot plug made of steel-wrapped concrete seals the waste into the wall.
"We have to drill those RH holes on a just-in-time basis," VandeKraats told me, "because salt has a quality of plasticity. We call it 'salt creep.' Over time, it will move and fill in any void." And once a room is full and sealed, there's no going back to retrieve a drum.
The idea is that over time the "salt creep" fills the voids, enveloping and encapsulating the waste within the geologic layer. Why store nuclear waste in salt? A number of reasons: It usually occurs only in extremely stable geologic regions--i.e. no earthquakes. Its presence proves the absence of flowing water, as groundwater would have dissolved the salt bed. It's easy to mine. And its plasticity heals any fractures in the bed, so if cracks were to occur the salt would naturally seal them.
"WIPP was no 'screw New Mexico' deal."
NIMBY opposition can sometimes increase the farther you move from a waste dump--further, in other words, from the people who might derive direct economic benefits from the project, and into the populations of people who simply feel a stigma associated with having their state be the nation's nuclear waste dump. But WIPP was no "screw New Mexico" deal. The locals in Carlsbad welcomed the mine. Back in 1975, the federal government considered building the repository in Lyons, Kansas, which sat atop a similarly thick bed of rock salt. Lyons and the state of Kansas wanted nothing to do with the project. People there were farmers. Soil and groundwater were their bread and butter, and they didn't want radioactive elements injected into the mix.
Carlsbad, by contrast, was a town of miners. Thriving potash mines drove the local economy. Folks there were comfortable working underground, and they knew all about the salt hidden below. "We said we'd be interested in considering it, and we'd keep an open mind," recalled John Heaton, a former state legislator who now serves as energy development coordinator for the city of Carlsbad. The potash mines were beginning to play out. A federally funded deep waste repository might keep local miners employed for decades.
And, perhaps more importantly, the state of New Mexico wanted it. Yucca Mountain remains unfinished because Nevada state officials fought it every step of the way. New Mexico, on the other hand, has embraced atomic projects ever since there were atomic projects to be embraced. Today New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory are two of the nation's leading nuclear research centers.
"When Michael O'Hare talks about indirect compensation, this is what he means."
Back on the surface, we returned our hardhats and radiation monitors to the mine gate manager. As we exited, a group of workers readied the next shipment of contact-handled waste for its ride down the same elevator into Room 6. The shipments don't ever stop at WIPP. They arrive at about a rate of about one truckload per day.
That caught me by surprise. "Truckload?" I said. "I would have thought you'd ship by rail." My reaction made Bobby St. John smile.
"We go out and talk to people along the route, and we keep going out," Bobby St. John told me. St. John is a communications specialist with Washington TRU Solutions, the private contractor (a subsidiary of the URS Corporation) running the WIPP site for the Department of Energy. He spends a lot of time on the road talking with communities along the specially designated interstate highways that serve as WIPP's trucking routes. Establishing those routes took years of negotiations and countless public meetings.
"It doesn't do any good to meet them once and forget about them," St. John said. Obtaining permission to allow trucks hauling nuclear waste to pass through a town, he said, requires a kind of information push. "We go out and talk to people," he told me. "Nobody wants to be blindsided. We all require information. So I'll go out and show people the containers we use, talk about the drivers we hire," he said.
St. John had recently returned from an emergency response training session with the Shoshone-Bannock tribe in Idaho, whose reservation encompasses a section of Interstate 15 used to truck nuclear waste from the Idaho National Laboratory cleanup site to WIPP. "We had a two-day training, all about responding to a hazardous materials accident along the highway," St. John said. When Michael O'Hare talks about indirect compensation, this is what he means. The Shoshone-Bannock first responders are getting a number of things out of the deal. Free training, of course. But they're also getting due respect from WIPP officials, an acknowledgement of the risk they're bearing, and a sense of inclusion in the larger project. They also have personal contacts--names and cell phone numbers of WIPP officials they've met face to face.
As for Carlsbad, it too has realized some long-term indirect compensation. For a city without a four-year college, the WIPP site has acted as a brain draw, providing well-paid jobs to highly educated engineers and administrators. That reverberates throughout the community, raising the level of expectations in local public schools, providing more coaches and volunteers and civic leaders. WIPP employees tend to stick around. Farok Sharif, the facility's general manager, has worked there for 23 years. Joe Franco, the head operations manager, grew up in Carlsbad. He's been at WIPP for more than two decades. That sort of thing matters. No community wants its nuclear waste facility run by fly-by-night employees with no sense of obligation to the place and its people.
"The home of the nation's newest nuclear waste repository"
Over the past decade, a "nuclear corridor" has been slowly developing in southern New Mexico. The WIPP site opened in 1999. When Urenco, one of the world's leading nuclear fuel suppliers, decided to undertake the first new uranium enrichment plant to be built in the United States in 30 years, it chose a site in Eunice, New Mexico, about 50 miles east of Carlsbad. The Urenco facility began operations in 2010. The Urenco plant is so close to a new low-level nuclear waste repository in Andrews, Texas, that workers in the two facilities could walk outside and share lunch.
Andrews County is a raw piece of Lone Star oilpatch that rubs up against the New Mexico border. The landscape is all oil pumpers and mesquite, with the prosperous little burg of Andrews (pop. 11,000) serving as the county's only incorporated town. Main Street's got a Sonic, a Dairy Queen, a Subway, and a Pizza Hut, but for a Wal-mart or Costco, you've got to drive 35 miles south to Odessa.
Andrews also happens to be the home of the nation's newest nuclear waste repository. The Waste Control Specialists (WCS) facility, which sits about 20 miles west of town along the New Mexico border, became the first U.S. commercial nuclear waste repository to open in 22 years when it opened in April 2012. The Andrews facility deposits 55-gallon waste drums in a massive clay-lined landfill. The landfill is open-air now, but it'll eventually be covered by 25 to 45 feet of red clay and soil. WCS is licensed to handle low-level waste: mildly irradiated waste from hospitals and scientific labs, as well as tools, walls, and flooring from decommissioned nuclear power plants. A far cry from hot spent fuel rods, in other words. What's striking is how much the citizens of Andrews seem to regard their new waste facility as a point of local honor. Here and there are yard signs that boast "Andrews Offers Solutions."
To be sure, the WCS facility has faced its share of controversy and opposition. A state environmental audit raised serious concerns about the company's safety record and about the proximity of the waste site to an underground water table. And it didn't sit well with many in Texas that Harold Simmons, the Dallas billionaire who owns WCS, is among the most prodigious political wheel-greasers in American industry; Simmons is one of the largest donors to Texas Governor Rick Perry, who hand-picked the environmental commission that ultimately approved the site (against the recommendation of some of its scientists). But it's notable that most of that opposition came from outside Andrews County.
In Andrews, locals were on board from the beginning. Civic leaders had spent years looking for ways to diversify the local economy away from the boom/bust cycles of agriculture and oil when the prospect of a nuclear dump first arose in the mid-1990s. After scientists from Texas Tech University surveyed the ground and declared that the WCS site didn't overlie the critical Ogallala Aquifer, the city of Andrews went ahead with the project. (The site's proximity to the Ogallala remains a point of contention.) Bob Zap, the mayor of Andrews, told me his neighbors were eager to take on a project few others would touch. "What did you want out of it?" I asked the mayor, thinking: money, tax base, jobs.
"You know, that's the interesting thing," Zap said. "The city gets employment for some people here, but the city itself doesn't get any revenue from it. Nor did we get any money up front for it. What we want is openness about what's going in there, good science and good regulation. There's a kind of pride about what we're doing out there."
"It's not as if nobody is willing to step forward"
Congress and the Obama Administration have yet to act on the Blue Ribbon Commission's recommendations. But that hasn't stopped some communities from stepping up and volunteering. Earlier this year South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard expressed interest in having the Department of Energy fund research into the suitability of his state's shale deposits for possible nuclear waste storage. Albert Carnesale, the nuclear engineer and former UCLA chancellor who served on the Blue Ribbon Commission, noted recently that Daugaard's interest "does not guarantee that South Dakota would say, 'Okay, put it here.'" But it did indicate, Carnesale said, that "it's not as if nobody is willing to step forward to even think about it."
In fact there's already an exploratory committee in New Mexico. The Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance, a group of local politicians and citizens in Eddy County and Lea County, New Mexico, is investigating the possibility of building an above-ground interim storage site for spent nuclear fuel. (Eddy County encompasses the city of Carlsbad. Lea County is its eastern neighbor.)
John Heaton, the former state legislator, is leading the effort. "We're looking at a surface storage facility," he told me. "We think it's an ideal site: ten miles north of the WIPP site, 40 miles from any population, seismically stable, very dry, with no overhead air traffic."
The two-square-mile site, Heaton told me, would have enough capacity to take all of America's spent fuel currently in dry cask containers.
There might be another advantage to siting a temporary storage facility near the WIPP mine. Heaton thinks the federal government should be taking a look at WIPP as an alternative to Yucca Mountain. And he's not alone. Last year James Conca and Judith Wright, geoscientists who've worked on disposal projects at Yucca Mountain, WIPP, and the Hanford site in Washington state, advocated turning WIPP into the nation's high-level nuclear waste disposal repository. It would cost, they estimate, about a third of what it would have cost to bring Yucca Mountain online, while "the annual revenue stream from the Nuclear Waste Fund is sufficient to accomplish this program, plus interim storage, without additional taxes or rate hikes."
WIPP officials tend to treat the idea with understandable delicacy. "What other continuing mission the government might consider really isn't up to us," WIPP General Manager Farok Sharif told me. He did note, however, that "the taxpayers have invested a lot of money in this facility. The good news is that we started as a pilot project, but we've demonstrated how well this can be done, how safe it is here."
John Heaton thinks it can be done. WIPP's experience building both its repository and an extensive transportation network makes him think there's a lot to build on here.
"You have to do it a community at a time, a state at a time," he told me. "It doesn't happen overnight. You don't just jump out and do these things. But we think it can be done. Overcoming the emotional concerns that come with all things nuclear is still the challenge. But we feel we know how to do that."
"We're America's nuclear corridor," he said. "And this is the next logical step to take."
Will Secretary Moniz Put Energy Back Into The Department of Energy? James Conca, Forbes March 9, 2013 President Barack Obama announced Monday that he will nominate Dr. Ernest Moniz to head the U.S. Department of Energy as Secretary. This was a wise move. There are not many who are better qualified, few with as much experience, and none with more chutzpah than Ernie Moniz. And he will need all three if he is to accomplish anything in a job that has been a standing nightmare for decades.
However, all week long the pundits, reporters, supporters and critics alike focused on Dr. Moniz' views and activities in renewable energy, fracking, climate change and environmental issues. This is all incredibly interesting, but all incredibly irrelevant. Moniz knows better than anyone else that the Department of Energy has almost nothing to do with energy. It's all about weapons and waste. Nuclear weapons and nuclear waste to be exact.
The public, Congress and even the White House can be forgiven for being confused by the word Energy in the title of the Department of Energy. There is a small component of nuclear energy in DOE, and an even smaller component of alternatives and fossil fuel (DOE FY2013 budget) but most of this is for basic scientific research.
Fairly recently, Moniz reiterated nuclear energy's critical role in reducing greenhouse gases as part of a balanced, low-carbon electricity generation portfolio (Foreign Affairs). DOE even has some licensing authority in exporting liquefied natural gas. As Secretary, Moniz could increase the DOE's role in actual energy.
But fracking, pipelines and wind turbines will not be much in the official mind of the Secretary, although it is one of his passions. His main focus will be: 1) moving nuclear waste disposal forward in the post-Yucca Mountain era of leaking nuclear waste tanks (Hanford tanks; Waste to NM), and 2) dealing with nuclear weapons, both their upkeep in the U.S. and their proliferation globally (Reuters). Iran and North Korea will pull his attention more than Pennsylvania and New York.
Not that Secretary Moniz doesn't know more than most about all energy sources. As the founding Director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), Moniz' vision was to link science, industry, innovation and policy to help transform global energy systems, focusing on renewables, energy efficiency, utility-scale liquid batteries and carbon management, among others (MITEI reports). Among his host of credentials, a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Stanford University started Dr. Moniz on this energetic path.
For the political realities of this job, Moniz is distinguished even from his predecessors. He served as Undersecretary of Energy from 1997 to 2001, overseeing all science and energy programs for DOE as well as the national laboratory system. He led a comprehensive review of our nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship program, enhanced the science and technology of environmental cleanup, and was the DOE special negotiator for Russia initiatives, focusing on disposal of Soviet-era nuclear materials. Before that, Moniz was an Associate Director for Science in the Clinton White House from 1995 to 1997.
He presently serves on the President's Council of Advisors for Science and Technology and on the Department of Defense Threat Reduction Advisory Committee. He recently served on the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future (BRC).
It was in his role with the BRC that our soon-to-be Secretary dealt head-on with the latest path forward for the nation's high-level nuclear waste, and the one that calls for his particular version of audacity.
The BRC drafted a number of recommendations addressing nuclear energy and waste issues (BRC 2011) but three recommendations, in particular, set the stage for a new strategy to dispose of high-level nuclear waste and to manage spent nuclear fuel in the United States:
1) interim storage for spent nuclear fuel,
2) resumption of the site selection process for a second repository, and
3) a quasi-government entity to execute the program and take control of the Nuclear Waste Fund in order to do so.
The first two recommendations allow removal and storage of spent fuel from reactor sites to be used in the future, and allows permanent disposal of actual waste, while the third controls cost and administration (No New Taxes).
But Secretary Moniz will have to steer his way through a spiderweb of laws and agreements dating back over 60 years, particularly the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 that is the defining document for high-level nuclear waste (HLW) and spent nuclear fuel (SNF).
Fortunately, most HLW is no longer high level, except in name only. So much time has passed that significant amounts of radionuclides have decayed away, and several campaigns to remove the most radioactive constituents (137Cs and 90Sr) have left most of the HLW tank waste with such low radioactivity that they now falls into a lower category, called transuranic (TRU) waste. Whatever is leaking from those High Level Waste tanks at Hanford, it's not high-level.
But bureaucratically and legally, it is still considered HLW. Embracing the ramifications of this new reality will engage our new Secretary in some Olympic-level gymnastics, but if done scientifically could change our approach to this problem in ways that would dramatically speed up disposal and reduce costs over our past choices.
Moniz and the BRC know the secret answer, the same known to the National Academy of Sciences in 1957 when they chose massive salt as the best rock formation in which to dispose of all nuclear waste. Unknown to most outside the BRC and the nuclear field, the United States has a successful operating deep permanent geologic nuclear repository for high and low activity waste, called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico (WIPP). WIPP was originally designed for all nuclear waste - HLW, SNF and TRU. It was restricted to just TRU administratively and as part of negotiations with the State of New Mexico at the time that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was being developed.
It will take a strong-willed Secretary to resurrect the best answer we've always had, and to push forward the very recommendations of the BRC that he crafted with his fellow Commissioners. One of his first actions as Secretary should be to visit the DOE's most successful program in history, the most successful that will be in his tenure.
WIPP is ahead of schedule and under-budget, a rare feat that has gone unnoticed in this era of anti-government rhetoric. Its success flows from the fact that it was put in the correct rock type, the massive salts of the Salado Formation of New Mexico and Texas. Because it is the best rock type, it garnered full support from scientists in the nuclear waste field.
The geological, physical, chemical, redox, thermal, and creep-closure properties of this rock make it an ideal formation for long-term disposal. Long-term in this case means more than 200 million years, not the mere ten or hundred thousand years sought after in hard rocks like Yucca Mountain at great cost and extreme machinations of engineering. At these depths and pressures, this salt cannot maintain an opening, or a crack, or a fracture, or any pore space over time. It is molecularly tight. We could not engineer a material this good.
A nice corollary to being the best rock is that the disposal cost in salt is a fraction of Yucca Mt. or any other potential site. Since we're broke, my bet is the cheapest and scientifically best site will win.
But, hey, if Americans want to spend an extra $200 billion dollars pretending Mother Nature is democratic, we're still rich.
Right?
With all of the issues facing the new Secretary, Ernie Moniz could pull some great wins out the hat. He may even get energy back into the Department of Energy. He's performed miracles before.
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