MSA DISTINGUISHED PUBLIC SERVICE MEDALIST LECTURE: RESET OF AMERICA’S NUCLEAR WASTE MANAGEMENT STRATEGY AND POLICY

The U.S. nuclear waste management program has labored for decades at a cost of billions of dollars each year, and yet, there is still no active disposal program either for spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors or for the high-level radioactive legacy waste and spent nuclear fuel from defense programs. Today, that program is an ever-tightening Gordian Knot – the strands of which are technical, scientific, logistical, regulatory, legal, financial, social and political – all subject to a web of agreements with states and communities, regulations, court ruling and the congressional budgetary process.

The Reset process convened a series of meetings of international experts, government officials, legislators, members of the Executive, nongovernmental organizations, and members of the affected public in order to identify systemic issues that have prevented the U.S. program from moving forward. The recommendations from these meetings include: i.) a new, independent, single-purpose waste management organization, funded by the utilities;ii.) an integration of the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle so that the same organization is responsible for the fuel from the time of its removal from a reactor until final disposal; iii.) consent-based siting process based on a redistribution of power among political entities; iv.) a new regulatory framework that places less emphasis on probabilistic performance assessment throughout the compliance period of hundreds of thousands of years.