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2 Fuel Cycle to Nowhere The Current Nuclear Waste Policy Dilemma The nuclear waste dilemma arises at the same time the nation faces momentous energy policy choices posed by the need for decisive actions to mitigate climate change and to reduce dependence on foreign oil. As a major part of an initiative to promote development of low-carbon and renewable energy resources, President Obama, with broad support in Congress but significant dissent from the public, has strongly supported big government subsidies and other initiatives to stimulate construction of large numbers of new nuclear power plants after twenty-five years in which not a single such plant has been built. George W. Bush’s administration invoked both climate and energy security goals in proposing the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), a major initiative to make new fuel from uranium and plutonium extracted from spent nuclear fuel (SNF), after an almost forty-year period in which there was a national moratorium on SNF reprocessing. GNEP was roundly criticized on technical, security, and cost grounds by a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) committee and numerous other independent experts; it was cancelled by the Obama administration. The brief U.S. experiment with SNF reprocessing ended in the 1970s after a dismal record of operational, financial, and environmental failures. Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter applied the coup de grace by halting federal aid for reprocessing because of the proliferation risks posed by the plutonium it produces. GNEP, however, triggered active discussion of reprocessing options, notwithstanding a barrage of powerful criticisms. Even if the public were otherwise prepared to go along with a major expansion of nuclear power, much less reprocessing, it is unlikely to do so without a new, credible regime for disposing of our existing and future nuclear power wastes. SNF continues to accumulate at seventy-seven nuclear power plant sites across the country without a disposal destination or even a plan for one. Meanwhile, the federal government is subject to mounting liabilities, running to many billions of dollars, to nuclear utilities for breach of its commitments to take charge of SNF and start disposing of it beginning in 1998. In addition to the massive SNF waste problem, there still reposes at Department of Energy (DOE) facilities a huge Cold War legacy of highly hazardous reprocessing wastes—high-level wastes (HLW)—from weapons production; these are being addressed by a massive, ongoing DOE cleanup effort expected to cost several hundreds of billions of dollars. DOE is obligated by agreements with the states where these facilities are located to remove these HLW by specified deadlines, but it will be unable to meet them unless the Yucca Mountain facility is built or another repository is developed soon. The Obama administration’s dilemma is this: it needs to solve the nuclear waste problem in order to advance its nuclear power agenda, but it has repudiated Yucca, the only waste solution available under current law. The nation’s dilemma is somewhat different . There is an imperative need to deal responsibly with the large quantity of nuclear wastes we already have and those that will continue to be generated at existing power plants, whatever the fate of the “nuclear renaissance” advocated by the administration and many in Congress. Obama’s abandonment of Yucca is currently being challenged in litigation. The wastes are left in legal and policy limbo in or near a host of communities large and small throughout the country. At this point, there is neither a plan to develop a repository nor a considered policy for how and where to store them in the interim. This does not mean that Yucca must at all costs be built. The technical merits of ...

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