DOE’s Spent Fuel Strategy: Disappointing for Nuclear Advocates, The Energy Collective, Steve Skutnik January 17, 2013 There is a hallowed tradition in Washington known as the 
“Friday Document Dump,” in which news and announcements the government wishes to bury are strategically timed for Friday afternoons, when such announcements tend to fall through the cracks of the typical news cycle (i.e., assuming reporters are even present to cover the event, the strategic timing tends to ensure it will miss the weekend papers, thus effectively “burying” the story by the time the new week rolls around).
In this storied tradition, the Department of Energy released the Obama administration’s response to the Blue Ribbon Commission report last Friday to relatively scarce media coverage. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find any coverage in many of the major papers; what little coverage there was can be found in the Washington Times, Platts(an energy publication), and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. (Needless to say, the timing appears to have had its intended effect)……..
Some of the major highlights:
- An emphasis upon a flexible, staged, consent-based process for locating a permanent geologic repository for used nuclear fuel designed to be adaptive to potentially changing circumstances.
- A new, independent waste disposal organization charged with overseeing used fuel management and disposal, along with legislative action to reform allocation of the Nuclear Waste Fee paid by operators to allow for greater operational flexibility and independence.
- Short-term emphasis upon siting a pilot interim storage facility for used nuclear fuel, with a triage priority of relocating fuel from decommissioned reactor sites first. Operations would begin in2021.
- Transitioning toward an operational interim storage site with sufficient capacity to meet the existing federal government’s liabilities under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982; operations to begin in 2025.
- Making “demonstrable progress” toward locating and characterizing a potential geologic repository with a target operations date of 2048…….
Perhaps to the disappointment of the AREVA (who emphasized reprocessing as a viable fuel cycle strategy in their blog response), the report seems to go out of its way to minimize the potential role of reprocessing in a future U.S. fuel cycle strategy – in fact, one point which stuck out to me was in that the DOE report recommended that the scope of the waste management organization (referred to as a “management and disposal organization, or “MDO” – because if there’s one thing Washington loves, it’s acronyms…) should be explicitly constrained to explicitly exclude reprocessing. Here’s the relevant quote:
In addition, the mission of the MDO will need to be carefully defined. For example, funding made available to the MDO should be used only for the management and disposal of radioactive waste. While this could include the management and disposal of waste resulting from the processing of defense materials, the MDO itself should not be authorized to perform research on, fund or conduct activities to reprocess or recycle used nuclear fuel. These limitations on the MDO mission are consistent with the recommendations of the BRC.
