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Introduction 3 Yucca—at a location chosen by Congress pursuant to a raw political power play—have been sharply challenged. Even if after long legal battles, a repository at Yucca is eventually licensed, and even if Congress funds its construction, the repository would not open for many years. Developing a brand-new repository elsewhere could take even longer. Another option could be to open WIPP to HLW and SNF, which is prohibited under current law due to New Mexico’s opposition to hosting these wastes in the past. Practical politics as well as sound principle dictate that to proceed with this option would require first winning New Mexico’s assent. To help it solve the nation’s dilemma, the administration has constituted a distinguished blue-ribbon commission charged to “conduct a comprehensive review of policies for managing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, including all alternatives for the storage, processing, and disposal of civilian and defense used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste.”1 The commission has been established at a watershed moment for U.S. nuclear waste policy, much like the Interagency Review Group (IRG) created by President Carter just over thirty years ago; IRG stimulated wide-ranging debate and made proposals for fundamental changes that significantly influenced future policy. The commission is tasked to provide to the president an interim report of its findings by August 2011, and a final report by January 2012. It should interpret its charge broadly in order to examine nuclear waste issues in relation to the technological and social systems of which they are but a part, including terrorism, proliferation, and energy security; the wisdom or folly of reviving reprocessing of spent fuel; and the institutional capacity of federal, state, and local actors effectively to safeguard nuclear wastes awaiting permanent disposal. Most of all, we hope that the commission will study, and learn from, the history of our nation’s law and policy on nuclear waste to date—including mistakes, missed opportunities, and successes. Lessons from Prior Government Programs for Nuclear Waste Disposal This book is in important respects a tale of two repositories. As we researched the history of U.S. nuclear waste policy, which really began in the 1950s with a key report by an NAS committee recommending deep geologic repository disposal for the nation’s most radioactive waste, we became fascinated by the question of why the WIPP repository for intermediate-level defense transuranic wastes succeeded in becoming the world’s only operating nuclear waste repository, while Yucca Mountain encountered seemingly unalterable opposition and has altogether foundered. The starkly opposed fates of the twin repositories raised a host of questions with critical implications for the future development of HLW and SNF repositories and interim storage facilities. Over the past sixty years, the federal government has undertaken three distinct programs for disposal of nuclear wastes. Congress designed two of these programs, one for HLW and SNF embodied in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), and a second for low-level waste (LLW), the 1980 Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act (LLRWPA ), and subsequent amendments to both laws. It is now clear that these statutes have failed to achieve their goals and that the programs fashioned by Congress are bankrupt. NWPA imposed a blueprint on DOE to develop two repositories for burial of HLW and SNF, one in the eastern and the other in the western part of the United States. In 1987, congressional power brokers from other states decreed that only one repository ...

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