Paul Murray, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and High Level Waste Disposition with the U.S. Department of Energy (Courtesy DOE)
Take a last look: Those iconic twin domes should be gone by mid-2027.
“Final backfill” at what was once San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station is slated for 2028.
And the highly radioactive spent fuel that has built up over so many decades — now encased in steel and concrete on a bluff over the blue Pacific — could begin exiting by 2040 to one of, say, five temporary storage sites.
“I hope I laid out a really simple vision for where we’re going,” said Paul Murray, the rock star of the recent SONGS Community Engagement Panel/Spent Fuel Solutions meeting. “Judge me on it. We have to make progress.”
Murray has a divine British accent, a mechanical engineer’s practicality and a mischievous twinkle in his eye. He was a bigwig in the nuclear industry for more than 40 years and is now the U.S. Department of Energy’s new “Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and High Level Waste Disposition,” bringing fresh energy and clear-eyed analysis to what has seemed a doomed and quixotic exercise: figuring out what to do with America’s commercial nuclear waste.
Why, exactly, is the U.S. the only Western nation — besides Ukraine! — that has no permanent repository program underway, despite nearly 75 years lead time and billions spent on moribund Yucca Mountain?
“It wasn’t a consent-based process,” Murray said flatly. “We basically forced Nevada to take the repository.”
Under the guidance of the US Department of Energy, the Sandia National Laboratory used the Large High-Performance Outdoor Shake Table at UC San Diego on June 12 to demonstrate the performance of dry storage systems under simulated earthquake conditions. (Courtesy Southern California Edison)
Nevada doesn’t have any nuclear power plants, and clearly, coercion doesn’t work. Nations with repository programs underway worked hard to get consent from host communities — and the DOE’s reborn effort is committed to doing the same.
“The only thing stopping us is public trust and political will to actually do it,” he said.
Gaining the public trust is vital, he said, detailing “performance demonstrations” where waste canisters can crash into bridges, drop from on high, endure showers of dead chickens — or whatever it takes to prove that they’re “robust and nothing is going to happen” when the time to transport waste to disposal sites finally comes.
To that end, a canister from San Onofre was recently taken to Sandia National Labs, loaded with dummy fuel assemblies, then placed on the shaker table at UC San Diego — one of the two largest earthquake simulators in the world — and subjected to myriad quakes to test their soundness.
“It was a bit underwhelming,” Murray said. “Nothing happened. But we will do this to help build public confidence that these systems are safe in an earthquake.”
Dan Stetson, chair of the volunteer Community Engagement Panel, agreed. “Yes, it was kind of boring,” he said. “Which was good.”
Muscling forward
Paralysis on the waste disposal front is extremely expensive.
U.S. taxpayers — whether they’ve reaped the fruits of nuclear energy or not — are forking over more than $2 million every day to reimburse utilities for the costs of babysitting — er, we mean, storing — this spent fuel. That’s some $800 million every single year.
Why are taxpayers on the hook? Because the federal government was contractually obligated to start picking up commercial nuclear waste for permanent disposal in 1998. Utility customers paid billions into the Nuclear Waste Fund to cover those costs. That fund has $47.7 billion, and earned about $1.7 billion in interest last year — but the feds still haven’t accepted an ounce of commercial fuel for permanent disposal.
Taxpayers stand to shell out another $35 billion to the utilities for storing this waste before an interim site (or sites) opens. Some say that liability could exceed $50 billion.
“The federal government has to take title to the fuel,” Murray said. “The only way to stop that liability is to take title to the fuel.”
Dry storage of used fuel rods at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station on Thursday, December 16, 2021. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Here at San Onofre, dry storage cost some $300 million to build and $20 million a year to run, Stetson said.
Murray has lots of ideas on how to muscle temporary storage forward.
There are 20 sites like San Onofre — shuttered reactors stuck with millions of pounds of highly radioactive waste. Might any be willing to host waste from other reactors until a permanent repository is built? “I want to explore this option,” he said. “It could save money overall.”
U.S. industry is working on repositories with governments overseas; Murray wants to mine that expertise and bring it home.
And why, he wonders, does everyone look past America’s one and only deep geologic repository, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico? It’s been operating for 25 years, disposing of waste from the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons programs, in salt beds thousands of feet below the earth’s crust. “How can my program collaborate?” he asked.
(Murray didn’t mention the two accidents at WIPP in 2014 that shut the program down for three years, but lessons have allegedly been learned and there hasn’t been much drama there over the past decade.)
Anyway, the DOE’s consent-based siting consortia is in the “Planning and Capacity Building” stage right now, trying to earn the trust of local communities and encouraging “mutual learning” and understanding of how nuclear waste management works. That’s slated to wrap up next year.
It’ll be followed by the “Site Screening and Assessment” stage, where DOE examines potential sites hand-in-hand with those communities (figure another 4-7 years here), wrapping up with the final “Negotiation and Implementation” stage, where agreements are struck with “willing and informed host communities, with licensing, construction and operation activities to follow” (another 4-5 years).
Keep in mind that this push for temporary storage is just a stopgap until a deep geologic disposal site (or sites) is built. It will require Congress to make changes to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to allow money to be spent on the effort, and Murray insists that the U.S. must have a dedicated office for nuclear waste disposal — and serious funding — to keep the process on track over what will literally be hundreds of years of work.
If temporary storage opens in 2040, and the oldest fuel is moved first from the nation’s reactors, it’ll take some 50 years before it’s all there. Expect a half-century to get a permanent repository open, and 100 years until it closes. That puts us at about 2300.
“This is a multi-generational project,” he said. “Slow but steady progress to build public and political trust. … Strong engagement with tribal representatives. … A simple vision everyone can understand. We’re moving, we’re making progress. Everyone can see it.”
Southern California Edison’s projected work schedule for San Onofre
Rallying
It’s with cautious optimism we note that things do seem to be moving forward.
The U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy, Climate and Grid Security held a hearing on “American Nuclear Energy Expansion; Spent Fuel Policy and Innovation” in the spring. Stetson was there, testifying about the importance of interim storage because it can get waste moved off-site decades earlier than deep geologic repositories. San Onofre, of course, is in an earthquake zone close to some 10 million people; not an ideal place to store nuclear waste.
“I was really surprised and felt good after the meeting,” Stetson said. “The amount of bipartisan engagement really surprised me and warmed my heart. I left feeling very optimistic.”
Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley and San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond recently trouped to Washington D.C. to stress the urgency of dealing with the nuclear waste conundrum upon congressional leaders and other federal officials. In Sacramento, Joint Resolution 18 was introduced in May by Assemblymember Laurie Davies, R-Laguna Niguel, and Sen. Catherine Blakespear, D-Encinitas, urging Congress “to prioritize fulfilling the federal government’s legal and contractual obligation to provide a home for spent nuclear fuel within California and 33 other states across the nation.”
U.S. Rep. Mike Levin, D-San Juan Capistrano, has made the issue a priority since arriving in Congress, helping forge a bipartisan caucus on the issue and shepherd through the funding to restart the consent-based siting initiative.
“I want to be clear-eyed,” he said. “It took years to make this mess, and it will take years to fix it.”
On July 1, the DOE issued a request for information “to identify industry partners interested in contributing to the development of federal consolidated interim storage facilities for the management of spent nuclear fuel. DOE is also seeking information from parties interested in providing engineering design, project management, integration, and other services needed to build and manage consolidated interim storage facilities.” Folks must submit responses by Sept. 5.
That feedback will inform a competitive request for proposals for the engineering design of an actual, real federal consolidated interim storage facility.
“While it may appear to be glacially slow,” Stetson said, “we are making progress.”
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