DOE official touts interim nuclear storage; seeks new waste laws

Washington (Platts)--5Dec2006

The US is facing a "new reality" in addressing nuclear waste, and
with Yucca Mountain potentially "decades" away, the country must employ
interim storage and reprocessing before shipping most civilian waste to the
Nevada repository, an official with the Department of Energy said Tuesday.

Speaking at a nuclear power conference hosted by Exchange Monitor
Publications, Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell said that the Nuclear Waste
Policy Act "obligates" DOE to push ahead with Yucca Mountain, largely to the
exclusion of interim storage.

He said, however, that new legislation is needed to set a policy based on
recycling, rather than once-through spent fuel. That legislation would, in
part, allow interim storage.

"We are confident that a good facility, an adequate facility, can be
built [at Yucca Mountain] to store the residue of recycled waste or defense
waste or other elements of spent fuel that cannot be recycled in a safe way
for as long as the country needs it," Sell said.

He added that the ascension of Nevada Democrat Harry Reid to Senate
majority leader, and the fact that DOE is eight years past its NWPA 1998
obligation to take spent fuel, necessitates a different approach to handling
nuclear waste.

"There are many ways that we can seek to compromise with the
congressional leadership in dealing with the question and potential
uncertainty of spent fuel management over the next few decades before Yucca
Mountain comes online," Sell said.

"We do think that it makes a lot of sense as we think about moving
towards a nuclear fuel cycle that is closed rather than once through that ...
some type of temporary consolidation of and storage of spent nuclear fuel at
recycling locations could possibly be a wise path forward."

He added that opening Yucca Mountain by 2017 or 2020 would only occur if
DOE is "wildly successful."

Last week Edward Sproat, director of DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive
Waste Management, said 2020 is a "more probable" timeframe than the 2017
date DOE had mapped out earlier this year under a best-case scenario.

--Daniel Whitten, daniel_whitten@platts.com

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