Interview: U.S. nuclear waste backlog could be eased by private disposal - Moniz

Valhi

20/09/2016 22:32

By Timothy Gardner 
    WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) - The United States could 
alleviate growing stockpiles of nuclear waste at U.S. power 
plants by allowing private companies to dispose of it and foster 
support for new nuclear projects, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest 
Moniz said on Tuesday. 
    The U.S. government spent billions of dollars on the Yucca 
Mountain project in Nevada that was supposed to store nuclear 
waste permanently underground, but politicians from the state, 
including top Senate Democrat Harry Reid, opposed the project, 
leading to its cancellation in 2010.  
    The waste is now mostly held at power plants in dry cask 
storage or in spent fuel pools, said Moniz, a nuclear physicist 
who has run the department since 2013. The United States could 
start transferring that waste to interim sites, potentially 
including government and private disposal sites, in the middle 
of the next decade until a permanent solution is developed.  
    "We would like to have the authority for publicly owned and 
operated (storage) facilities. We are also very much interested 
in the possibility of pursuing private storage," Moniz said in 
an interview about the nuclear issues the next administration 
will face after President Barack Obama leaves office on Jan. 20. 
    The Nuclear Regulatory Commission received an application 
earlier this year from Waste Control Specialists, part of Valhi 
Inc  VHI.N  to store waste at a site in Texas. More companies 
may also apply.  
    "Potentially that could go faster," if the private sector 
took on the challenge, Moniz said of the mid-2020s' timeframe 
for moving waste into interim storage.  
    Nuclear power supplies 60 percent of the country's virtually 
carbon-free electricity and is an important part of Obama's plan 
to fight climate change. But even some of his fellow Democrats 
have reservations about moving ahead with nuclear, which faces 
competition from natural gas, until the waste problem is solved. 
    
    Senator Diane Feinstein told Moniz at a congressional 
hearing last week she would not support new nuclear power 
projects unless the issue is dealt with. 
    Moniz said if companies take over storage, Congress will 
still need to act. One thing the next administration will have 
to work on with Congress is making sure that money from the 
nuclear waste fund, set up in 1983 to help pay for Yucca 
Mountain, would be available to pay companies for the storage.   
     
    MOX PLANT 
    Another thorny issue on nuclear waste has been an agreement 
with Russia to convert plutonium left over from the Cold War to 
nuclear plant fuel. Under the deal struck in 2000, each country 
is expected to convert 34 tons of the material into fuel 
pellets.  
    The federal government has spent about $5 billion on a plant 
in South Carolina and associated facilities that would convert 
the material into MOX, or mixed-oxide pellets for reactors.  But 
cost estimates for the project have soared, and now Moniz says 
the MOX method would cost up to $50 billion over 50 years.  
    He wants the country to consider simply diluting the 
plutonium with inert materials and disposing the mix deep 
underground, such has been done for other nuclear materials in 
New Mexico.    
    But Russia would have to sign off on the idea, an action 
Moniz is optimistic about in part because Moscow has already 
changed its side of the original deal. Russia now wants to 
dispose of the fuel in a so-called fast reactor, a technology 
the United States does not have. Moniz has brought up the idea 
of underground disposal to his counterparts in Russia as a 
"heads up," he said.  
    "What Russia has said is if Congress acts to say that the 
dilute and dispose approach is the preferred alternative, then 
they will engage on this question of change," he said.  
    With many hurdles ahead on nuclear issues, speculation has 
grown on whether Moniz would remain in his role as energy 
secretary in the next administration. Moniz would not say 
whether he would rule it out.  
 
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Video of energy secretary interview    http://bit.ly/2dhpqIp 
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 (Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Cynthia Osterman) 
 ((timothy.gardner@thomsonreuters.com; +1 202 898-8360)(Twitter 
@timogard)(; Reuters Messaging: 
timothy.gardner.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net)) 
 
Keywords: USA NUCLEAR/MONIZ