Nuclear power and the challenge of high-level waste disposal in the United States

Polity

Volumn 45, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 265-280

  Kraft, Michael E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN GREEN BAY   (United States)

Author keywords

nuclear power; Nuclear Regulatory Commission; nuclear waste policy; President Barack Obama; United States energy policy; Yucca Mountain

Indexed keywords

EID: 84876806595     PISSN: 00323497     EISSN: 17441684     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1057/pol.2013.4     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (76)

1. Matthew L. Wald, "2 New Reactors Approved in Georgia," New York Times, February 9, 2012. As of mid-2010 (before the Fukushima disaster), the U.S. nuclear industry took advantage of a new streamlined licensing process to submit 22 applications to the NRC for 33 new reactors. It remains unclear how many of those applications will go forward.
2. Eugene Rosa, et al., "Nuclear Waste: Knowledge Waste?" Science 329 (August 13, 2010): 762-63.
3. Catherine Butler, Karen A. Parkhill, and Nicholas F. Pidgeon, "Nuclear Power after Japan: The Social Dimensions," Environment 53 (November/December 2011): 3-15.
4. In May 2012, Jaczko announced that he would step down from his position as NRC chairman following controversies over his management style and policy positions. President Obama nominated Allison M. Macfarlane, a geologist and an environmental science and policy professor at George Mason University, as his successor.
5. Following Senate confirmation, she took office on July 9, 2012. Macfarlane is the first geologist to serve on the NRC and is doing so when geological questions are central to the challenge of nuclear-waste disposal.
6. Matthew L. Wald, "U.S. Supports New Nuclear Reactors in Georgia," New York Times, February 16, 2010.
7. The loan-guarantee program was authorized by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. In effect, the federal government is backing the bank loan.
8. Should the reactors be built and operate profitably, the borrowers repay the loan and pay a fee to the federal government for its loan guarantee. However, should the nuclear utilities default on the loan, the federal government is obliged to repay it. Critics have long argued that the risk of failure is high.
9. Estimates vary, but the $11 billion was cited by the director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management in 2008. See Richard Kerr, "Light at the End of the Radwaste Disposal Tunnel Could Be Real," Science 333 (July 8, 2011), 150-52.
10. Matthew L. Wald, "As Nuclear Waste Languishes, Expense to U.S. Rises," New York Times, February 17, 2008, 15;
11. and Allison M. Macfarlane, "The Overlooked Back End of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle," Science 333 (September 2, 2011): 1225-26.
12. The estimate of reactor construction projects comes from the World Nuclear Association: www.world-nuclear.org/outlook/clean-energy-need.html. The common failing to site a repository given local opposition is discussed in Kerr, "Light at the End of the Radwaste Disposal Tunnel."
13. The process of terminating the Yucca Mountain investigation and license is administratively and legally complex.
14. The NRC, "High Level Waste Disposal: Update on Status of High-level Waste Disposal Program as of September 30, 2011," at http://www.nrc.gov/ waste/hlw-disposal.html (accessed April 2012).
15. The commission's final report and separate reports by its subcommittees can be found at the commission Web site: www.brc.gov.
16. Luther J. Carter, Nuclear Imperatives and Public Trust: Dealing with Radioactive Waste (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 1987);
17. and Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), chapter 4.
18. See Baumgartner and Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics.
19. Riley E. Dunlap, Michael E. Kraft, and Eugene A. Rosa, ed., Public Reactions to Nuclear Waste: Citizens' Views of Repository Siting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
20. Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, "Report to the Secretary of Energy (Washington, DC: Blue Ribbon Commission, January 26, 2012), 29-31.
21. Matthew L. Wald, "As Nuclear Waste Languishes." Nuclear utilities are required by law to pay into the fund one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour.
22. Barry G. Rabe, Beyond NIMBY: Hazardous Waste Siting in Canada and the United States (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994).
23. The Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1985 gave to the states the responsibility for disposing of their low-level waste, and it encouraged the states to form compacts among themselves so they could work together on solutions.
24. Most of the states have entered such compacts, but the new disposal facilities have not been built. Instead the waste goes to previously existing disposal facilities, which the NRC and the states regulate.
25. Matthew L. Wald, "What Now for Nuclear Waste?" Scientific American 301 (August 2009), 46-53.
26. The Blue Ribbon Commission report has a detailed analysis of the various components of high-level waste on pages 12-14.
27. Robert Vandenbosch and Suzanne E. Vandenbosch, "The Revised Radiation Protection Standards for the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository," Physics and Society 38 (January 2009): 7-10;
28. Luther J. Carter and Thomas H. Pigford, "Proof of Safety at Yucca Mountain," Science 310 (October 21, 2005): 447-48.
29. Michael E. Kraft, "Policy Design and the Acceptability of Environmental Risks: Nuclear Waste Disposal in Canada and the United States," Policy Studies Journal 28 (2000): 206-18;
30. and Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Burying Uncertainty: Risk and the Case against Geological Disposal of Nuclear Waste (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).
31. The Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) completed a study in 2005 called Choosing a Way Forward: The Future Management of Canada's Used Nuclear Fuel, which set out a long-term strategy for managing high-level waste.
32. It incorporated earlier inquiries by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency into ethical questions during hearings in 1996.
33. The report is available at the Web site of the NWMO: www.nwmo.ca/uploads- managed/MediaFiles/341-NWMO-Final-Study-Nov-2005-E.pdf (accessed April 2012).
34. See Eli Kintisch, "Congress Tells DOE to Take Fresh Look at Recycling Spent Reactor Fuel," Science 310 (December 2, 2005): 1406;
35. and Margaret Kriz, "Deep-Sixing Yucca Mountain," National Journal (May 16, 2009), 48-49.
36. Wald, "As Nuclear Waste Languishes";
37. and Matthew L. Wald, "Crisis Revising Long U.S. Fight Over Spent Fuel," New York Times, March 24, 2011. The Blue Ribbon Commission indicated that 50,000 metric tons of waste are kept in water pools and 15,000 in dry (cask) storage. A metric ton is 2,200 pounds.
38. Dunlap, Kraft, and Rosa, Public Reactions to Nuclear Waste; Blue Ribbon Commission, "Report to the Secretary of Energy.
39. Matthew L. Wald, "A Safer Nuclear Crypt," New York Times, July 5, 2011, on the relative safety of dry-cask storage over keeping the waste in pools of water.
40. Matthew L. Wald, "For New Nuclear Chief, Concerns over Plant Safety," New York Times, August 13, 2012.
41. James R. Temples, "The Politics of Nuclear Power: A Subgovernment in Transition," Political Science Quarterly 95 (Summer 1980): 239-60;
42. Gerald Jacob, Site Unseen: The Politics of Siting a Nuclear Waste Repository (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990);
43. Robert J. Duffy, Nuclear Politics in America: A History and Theory of Government Regulation (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1997).
44. U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, Managing the Nation's Commercial High-level Radioactive Waste (Washington, DC: OTA, 1985), esp. 39-80.
45. Michael E. Kraft, "Technology, Analysis, and Policy Leadership: Congress and Radioactive Waste," in Science, Technology, and Politics: Policy Analysis in Congress, ed. Gary C. Bryner (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).
46. The summary history here is drawn in part from Michael E. Kraft, Eugene A. Rosa, and Riley E. Dunlap, "Public Opinion and Nuclear Waste Policymaking," in Public Reactions to Nuclear Waste, ed. Dunlap, Kraft, and Rosa. See also Carter, Nuclear Imperatives and Public Trust.
47. Michael E. Kraft and Bruce B. Clary, "Citizen Participation and the NIMBY Syndrome: Public Response to Radioactive Waste Disposal." Western Political Quarterly 44 (June 1991): 299-328;
48. and Kraft and Clary, "Public Testimony in Nuclear Waste Repository Hearings," in Public Reactions to Nuclear Waste, ed. Dunlap, Kraft, and Rosa.
49. James Everett Katz, Congress and National Energy Policy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1984);
50. Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Nuclear Power and Public Policy: The Social and Ethical Problems of Fission Technology (Boston, MA: D. Reidel, 1980).
51. Regina S. Axelrod, "Energy Policy: Changing the Rules of the Game," in Environmental Policy in the 1980s: Reagan's New Agenda, ed. Norman J. Vig and Michael E. Kraft (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1984).
52. Daniel S. Metlay, "Radioactive Waste Management Policymaking," in Managing the Nation's Commercial High-Level Radioactive Waste;
53. and Shrader-Frechette, Nuclear Power and Public Policy.
54. Dunlap, Kraft, and Rosa, Public Reactions to Nuclear Waste;
55. and Michael E. Kraft, "Public and State Responses to High-level Nuclear Waste Disposal: Learning from Policy Failure." Policy Studies Review 10 (Winter 1991-92): 152-66.
56. U.S. Government Accountability Office, "Nuclear Waste Management: Key Attributes, Challenges, and Costs of the Yucca Mountain Repository and Two Potential Alternatives" (Washington, DC: GAO-10-48, November 2009).
57. Allison M. Macfarlane and Rodney C. Ewing, ed. Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation's High-Level Nuclear Waste (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).
58. Quoted in Rosa, et al., "Nuclear Waste: Knowledge Waste?" 762.
59. Rosa, et al., "Nuclear Waste: Knowledge Waste?"
60. Quoted in Kerr, "Light at the End of the Radwaste Disposal Tunnel."
61. The quotations are taken from the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, "Report to the Secretary of Energy (Washington, DC: Blue Ribbon Commission, January 26, 2012), available at http://brc.gov/sites/default/ files/documents/brc-finalreport-jan2012.pdf (accessed April 2012), vi-xv.
62. Blue Ribbon Commission, "Report to the Secretary of Energy," viii-xiv.
63. For a discussion of what a "consent-based" process involves, see the commission's final report, pages 47-59.
64. See Kerr, "Light at the End of the Radwaste Disposal Tunnel."
65. U.S. Government Accountability Office, "Nuclear Waste: Disposal Challenges and Lessons Learned from Yucca Mountain" (Washington, DC: GAO-11-731T, June 1, 2011).
66. See, for example, an editorial in Scientific American in June 2011, "Coming Clean about Nuclear Power." See also Richard Stewart and Jane Stewart, Fuel Cycle to Nowhere: U.S. Law and Policy on Nuclear Waste (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011);
67. and Robert Vandenbosch and Suzanne E. Vandenbosch, Nuclear Waste Stalemate: Political and Scientific Controversies (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2007).
68. See also Kenneth A. Rodger and Marvin G. Kingsley, "The Politics of Interim Radioactive Waste Storage: The United States," Environmental Politics 13 (Autumn 2004): 590-611;
69. and Jane I. Dawson and Robert G. Darst, "Meeting the Challenge of Permanent Nuclear Waste Disposal in an Expanding Europe: Transparency, Trust and Democracy," Environmental Politics 15 (August 2006): 610-27.
70. Harold Feiveson, Zia Mian, M. V. Ramana, and Frank von Hippel, "Managing Nuclear Spent Fuel: Policy Lessons from a 10-Country Study," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 27, 2011.
71. Kristin Shrader-Frechette, What Will Work: Fighting Climate Change with Renewable Energy, Not Nuclear Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
72. Matthew L. Wald, "Wisconsin Nuclear Reactor to Be Closed," New York Times, October 22, 2012;
73. and Tom Content, "Dominion to Close Kewaunee Nuclear Plant," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, October 22, 2012.
74. U.S. Energy Information Administration, "Energy Consumption by Primary Fuel," early release overview (Washington, DC: EIA, January 23, 2012).
75. The numbers come from Figure 8, U.S. Primary Energy Consumption by Fuel, 1980 to 2035. The production of natural gas has increased markedly in recently years, and its use instead of coal will reduce greenhouse gas emissions somewhat.
76. Matthew L. Wald, "Administration to Make Push for Small 'Modular' Reactors in New Budget," New York Times, February 13, 2011.