POWER July 2013 - 70

NUCLEAR POWER
panel, which the administration announced
in January 2010. The chairman of the panel
was former Democratic congressman Lee
Hamilton of Indiana. Concluding that " [a]
new strategy is needed, " the commission laid
out its views in July 2011, and was unable
to come up with anything new. Acknowledging
that Screw Nevada had failed, the
commission called for new legislation and a
new arrangement of the waste management
deck chairs at the Department of Energy, to
administer a consent-based approach, rather
than the political coercion that characterized
the 1987 law. The commission said the approach
taken to siting the small New Mexico
test for disposing of transuranics could be a
model for the future.
More explicitly, some in DOE have been
focusing on expansion of WIPP for disposing
of used civilian reactor fuel. The trade
newsletter Energy Daily reported in early
2011 that " Energy Department officials, as
well as some governors and lawmakers, are
warming to the idea of trying to bury some of
the nation's high-level waste at DOE's Waste
Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. "
But there are serious technical obstacles
to turning the much smaller WIPP saltbased
storage site into a final spent fuel
repository. Two Albuquerque, New Mexico,
experts-Christopher Timm and Jerry
Fox-discussed some of the limits to using
WIPP in a September 2011 paper for Nuclear
Energy International magazine. They
also noted that the original decision to build
the project created a considerable political
uproar, including opposition by the local
congressman, several lawsuits, and a twenty-year
delay in the project while it could
be restructured and reduced in size to meet
local political objections.
Despite the failure of the 1986 law, former
journalist Luther Carter, along with
DOE waste program veteran Lake Barrett
and former NRC commissioner Kenneth
Rogers, were pushing for resurrection of the
Nevada site. In a fall 2010 edition of Issues
in Science and Technology, the three lobbied
the Obama commission to spit in the face
of its creators and support continued development
of Yucca Mountain. They argued,
" Surely this is not the time to abandon the
only currently viable option for very longterm
geologic retrievable storage of spent
fuel, and possibly final disposal. "
It should come as no surprise that the
commission deliberately refused to take this
action, instead issuing a typically anodyne
report advocating unspecified changes to
make things right. In the meantime, the nuclear
regulators have repeatedly judged that
it is safe to store spent reactor fuel above
the ground and at the site of the operating
reactor. That will be the default position on
minding the nation's used nuclear fuel, and
there appears to be no reason why it won't
continue for as long as anyone can predict.
Note to readers: If you wish to learn about
the sources for this book, please connect to
the web site www.toodumb.org, where you
will find a bibliography and chapter source
notes. The web site also includes a bonus
chapter on the cons and frauds that have
surrounded the quest for fusion energy, a
picture gallery with images of many of the
people, places, and things mentioned in the
book, and the Too Dumb Film Festival, five
YouTube videos related to the five sections
of the book. ■
-Kennedy Maize is a POWER contributing
editor and executive editor of MANAGING
POWER. Too Dumb to Meter is available
from the POWER Bookstore or Amazon.
com and is serialized by permission.
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POWER July 2013

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