Fuel Cycle to Nowhere: U.S. Law and Policy on Nuclear Waste by Richard Burleson Stewart and Jane Bloom Stewart (review)

Since the Manhattan Project and the early days of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's reactor development program, the issues surrounding radioactive waste disposal have remained unresolved. Richard and Jane Stewart, environmental lawyers and authors of Fuel Cycle to Nowhere, set out to present a comprehensive analysis of American policy decisions concerning nuclear wastes, from classification to transportation and finally to the actual locating of waste repositories. Rather than focusing attention on specific policy choices or a particular episode in the nation's decades-long struggle to solve the nuclear waste conundrum, the authors ambitiously try to analyze all major policy decisions over the entirety of the problem's lifetime. The authors served as members of the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation, a multi-university group led by Vanderbilt University and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. Fuel Cycle to Nowhere is an effort to influence the recommendations made by the presidentially appointed Blue Ribbon Committee on America's Nuclear Future.

The Stewarts perhaps overstretched themselves in trying to present a comprehensive history of nuclear waste legislation and regulation. The book's first chapter on the development of the nuclear waste regulatory framework is informative, but at times it dissolves into a morass of jargon and redundancy. The next chapter focuses on waste classification and regulation. The authors make an admirable effort to explain the amalgamation of statutes and regulations that, institutionalized over decades, formed the core of the current U.S. waste classification system. However, the chapter suffers from many of the same problems associated with the previous one. The Stewarts shift attention to the policies regulating the transportation of nuclear wastes in the book's third chapter. Absent here was any discussion of the technologies engineered to meet the demands of safely moving nuclear waste across the country, whether by rail or road. A brief comparative analysis between rail and truck modes of transportation surfaced mid-chapter, but the comparison focused primarily on risk calculations.

Chapters 5 and 6 contained the most valuable portions of the book. The Stewarts set up a very useful comparison between the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) located near Carlsbad, New Mexico, and the now-closed Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada. The authors demonstrate that, through a largely improvised and flexible process of negotiation, local residents, state officials, and federal agencies achieved compromises that eventually permitted WIPP to open. This piecemeal approach to policymaking encouraged local and state input while requiring the federal government to consider issues that otherwise would have been ignored. The Stewarts contrast the success of WIPP with the Yucca Mountain experience. Although other histories have been written about Yucca Mountain, such as J. Samuel Walker's The Road to Yucca Mountain (2009), Fuel Cycle to Nowhere underscores the stark differences between the two waste repositories. If flexibility and compromise highlight WIPP's success, rigidity and a predetermined site policy characterized the failure of Yucca Mountain to win local and state support. Congressional decisions that designated Yucca Mountain as the sole location the Energy Department could investigate undercut input from residents and state officials while creating adversarial relationships. Unsurprisingly, the state of Nevada refused to accept being sacrificed as the nation's nuclear waste dump.

The Stewarts conclude their book with a plan to revise the country's nuclear fuel cycle. The authors admit the necessity of at least one more geologic waste repository. They argue that in locating such a facility, the federal government needs to follow the WIPP model of success. The Stewarts also recommend the creation of a federal corporation to operate such a facility and a reconsideration of how nuclear waste disposal is funded. Environmental and nuclear energy historians will find Fuel Cycle to Nowhere a useful reference. However, the book suffers from repetition and an overuse of jargon. The comparative...