On Wednesday, I testified at a hearing of the Environment Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The hearing focused on the discussion draft of a bill entitled “The Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017.”
Yucca Mountain (Source: White House)
The draft bill’s primary objective is to revive the program to build a geologic repository at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive wastes. The Obama administration cancelled the program in 2009, calling it “unworkable,” and the state of Nevada is bitterly opposed to it, but Yucca Mountain still has devoted advocates in Congress, including the chairman of the subcommittee, John Shimkus (R-IL).
UCS supports the need for a geologic repository for nuclear waste in the United States but doesn’t have a position on the suitability of the Yucca Mountain site. We don’t have the scientific expertise needed to make that judgement.
However, in my testimony, I expressed several concerns about the draft bill, including its focus on locating a repository only at Yucca Mountain and its proposal to weaken the NRC’s review standards for changes to repository design.
UCS believes that rigorous science must underlie the choice of any geologic repository, and that the US needs options in addition to Yucca Mountain, which has many unresolved safety issues. In addition, we believe that any legislation that revises the Nuclear Waste Policy Act must be comprehensive and include measures to enhance the safety and security of spent fuel at reactor sites—where it will be for at least several more decades. For example, we think it is essential to speed up the transfer of spent fuel from pools to dry storage casks.