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Wrestling with the Hydra of Nuclear Waste Storage in the United States (2013)

Auteur	B.Sovacool, A.Funk
	3-01-4-10-51.pdf
Datum	maart 2013
Classificatie	3.01.4.10/51 (VS - AFVAL)
Voorkant

Wrestling with the Hydra of Nuclear Waste Storage in the United States
Benjamin K. Sovacool and Alex Funk
The Electricity Journal
March 2013, Vol. 26, Issue 2

Despite decades of legal and policy action, and billions of
dollars expended on a recently scrapped permanent
nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain, the
inability to resolve the longstanding issue of waste will
seriously threaten a nuclear renaissance in the United
States.

I. Introduction
In ancient Greek mythology the hydra was a serpent-like beast with many heads 
that guarded the entrance to the Underworld. It had a breath so deadly that even 
its footprints were reputed to poison men to death. The inability of the United 
States to yet build and operate a safe permanent geologic repository for spent 
nuclear fuel rods and high-level nuclear waste could very well be the industry’s
equivalent of a hydra, lurking beneath the surface, for it is an issue that 
poses perhaps the most serious threat to continued expansion of the industry.
For those who have not kept up to date on recent events, the Barack Obama 
Administration asked the Department of Energy (DOE) to establish a Blue Ribbon 
Commission (BRC) to develop a new approach to nuclear waste disposal in January
2010. A few months later that year, the DOE filed a motion with the Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission (NRC) to withdraw the pending license application ‘‘with 
prejudice’’ for Yucca Mountain.1 Then, in New York v. NRC,2 the D.C. Circuit 
Court of Appeals vacated a 2010 update to the NRC’s Waste Confidence Decision 
in late 2012.
Responding to this decision, the NRC has postponed the insurance of at least 
19 new reactor licenses and has stated that no new licenses will be issued 
until the agency can address the issues raised by the D.C. Circuit.