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Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
       Experts came to the hearing and told the members of the committee that unless the waste problem was dealt with, the decline of the nuclear industry in the U.S. would continue. Most of the nuclear power plants in the U.S. were built in the 1970s. Five plants will be shut down permanently by 2025. The construction of two new nuclear power plants in South Carolina were cancelled in 2017. The contractors ran way over budget and local rate payers are on the hook for over nine billion dollars. Two more new nuclear power reactors are currently under construction in Georgia. There are fights between contractors and court battles interfering with the completion of the project.
      The Murkowski bill calls for a new agency outside of Congress to pick a place for temporary spent nuclear fuel storage within in the next ten years. The biggest obstacle to any plan for spent nuclear fuel storage is the question of “consent.” Some local communities or Native American tribes would like the business and jobs that would accompany any storage site but politicians in Nevada, Utah and Tennessee have prevented such siting.
      Independent Maine Senator Angus King asked a very important question at the hearing. “What if every state says no? What do we do then?” Geoffry Fettus is the senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. He agrees that the stalemate over spent nuclear fuel storage will continue until the question of consent is solved. He said, “We have a higher chance of states getting to yes if they don’t have to take the entire burden.” He suggested that the burden and cost of hosting a storage site should be split among several sites at different locations.
      West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin raised questions about how long spent nuclear fuel could be stored in dry casks. He also suggested that spent nuclear fuel might ultimate be recycled although the U.S. recently cancelled construction of a facility to recycle spent nuclear fuel. France and Japan reprocess spent nuclear fuel. France uses a process called vitrification to convert the spent nuclear fuel remaining after reprocessing into glass logs for burial in a geological repository.
       Congress has banned the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel since the late 1970s. This was done out of fear that the reprocessing could be used to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. This plutonium could be used to construct a nuclear bomb. Steve Nesbit is the head of nuclear policy for Duke Energy and the American Nuclear Society which represents nuclear scientists and engineers. He said that uranium is so cheap and available that reprocesses does not make sense economically.
       Nesbit said, “Used nuclear fuel is being stored safely today and poses no immediate danger to the public. However, the lack of progress on a geologic repository has endangered nuclear power’s potential to address our long-term energy and environmental goals.”
       Senator Murkowski closed the hearing with the hope that solutions for the political, legal, and technological problems would soon be found. Each year, more than two thousand two hundred metric tons of spent nuclear fuel are added to cooling pools and/or dry casks. The total amount of spent nuclear fuel stored in the U.S. today is approaching one hundred thousand tons.