Advice for the Blue Ribbon Commission

From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

President Barack Obama's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future will have its first meeting this week. The commission, formed after Obama cancelled the Yucca Mountain spent nuclear fuel repository in January, is tasked with rebooting the country's five-decade-plus effort to manage its high-level radioactive waste.

The problems the commission will consider are far from new. In 1957 the National Academy of Sciences warned that "[t]he hazard related to radioactive waste is so great that no element of doubt should be allowed to exist regarding safety." In that same year the academy recommended that the U.S. government establish deep geologic disposal as the best solution to the problem. In 1982, after embarrassing failures by the Atomic Energy Commission (the predecessor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Energy Department) to select a waste site on its own, Congress enacted the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which began the selection process for multiple sites throughout the United States. This process was scrapped five years later due to eastern states derailing the selection process. At that time Congress voted to make Yucca Mountain the only site to be considered. Yet Yucca's proposed opening date slipped by more than 20 years as the project encountered major technical hurdles and fierce local and state opposition.

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