Panel appointed to seek Yucca Mountain alternatives

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration continued its march away from Yucca Mountain today with the naming of a 15-member panel of experts to chart new paths to manage highly radioactive nuclear waste.

The commission will be led by two Washington policy veterans, former Rep. Lee Hamilton and longtime presidential adviser Brent Scowcroft, the Energy Department announced.

Other members are well known, including former Sens. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., former high-ranking government energy officials, and representatives of the nuclear industry, organized labor, environmental groups and academia.

The Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future will be given two years to do its work. A draft report will be due in 18 months.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the commission will have a free hand to examine a “full range of scientific and technical options” on waste storage, reprocessing and disposal, with one exception: the once-favored Yucca Mountain underground repository.

Talking with reporters, Chu and chief White House energy adviser Carol Browner made it clear that the Nevada site, which had been the government’s sole focus for more than 20 years, is off the table.

“The debate over Yucca Mountain is over, as the president has made clear many times,” said Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy.

“It is time to move forward with a new strategy based on the best science and the advice of a broad range of experts,” Browner said.

Hamilton said Chu made it “quite clear that nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain is not an option, and that the blue ribbon commission will be looking at better alternatives.”

The idea of storing, and ultimately burying, nuclear spent fuel underground is outdated, Hamilton said, adding, “It has been made clear to me that science has advanced dramatically since the Yucca site was chosen 20 years ago or so. We are going to pull together the current information and research to develop a plan.”

The naming of a commission appears to be another step in the dismantlement of the Yucca Mountain Project, which long has been a lightning rod among environmentalists and many people in Nevada, including virtually all the state’s elected leaders.

The project was envisioned as a warren of tunnels deep inside Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, where at least 77,000 tons of spent fuel from commercial plants, and government-generated nuclear waste, would be stored and ultimately buried.

The cost had grown to almost $100 billion and fell more than a decade beyond schedule due to a series of management missteps, legal challenges and budget cuts engineered by opponents in Congress.

The next step down could come on Monday when the Obama administration releases its proposed 2011 federal budget. The budget is expected to contain only token funding for the program.

Its downfall traces to an alliance between Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and President Barack Obama, who pledged early in his White House campaign to end the repository and has kept his promises so far.

Reid said Chu assembled “some of the smartest people in the country” for the commission.

“President Obama and I have worked closely to stop dumping taxpayer money into Yucca, and I have fought hard to ensure Yucca Mountain is dead,” Reid said. “This panel of experts proposing other options for nuclear waste is the logical next step in that process.”

Other Nevadans in Congress echoed the sentiment.

Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley said Obama was fulfilling his promise to end the repository project. Democratic Rep. Dina Titus said the commission means “we are closer than ever to ensuring Yucca Mountain never becomes a reality.”

In Carson City, the announcement was met with tempered enthusiasm.

Bruce Breslow, executive director of the Agency for Nuclear Projects, said formation of the panel was encouraging, but the state’s fight against the project would end only when the Department of Energy withdraws a repository license application under review at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

In the meantime, Breslow said once the panel is up and running the state will volunteer to testify or brief commissioners, as will others who have been challenging the Yucca project in NRC legal hearings.

“We can tell them and point out everything they did wrong so they don’t ever do that again,” Breslow said, referring not only to the Nevada site itself but to the process that selected Yucca Mountain and the often difficult relationship between the state and the Energy Department.

“The state of Nevada and probably every party to the lawsuit are all going to be making overtures to the blue ribbon commission offering help, expertise, information, studies,” Breslow said.

Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, said today it is time to look ahead. Solving the nuclear waste problem is important to the goal adopted by the administration to promote nuclear power as a response to climate change.

He said the commission will take a broad look at managing nuclear waste, a topic that policymakers have wrestled with since the birth of the nuclear era. The radioactive spent fuel that emerges through the production of nuclear power is among the deadliest substances.

“As a scientist, I have said many times these issues are solvable in a manner that can gain the confidence of the American people,” Chu said. “This panel of experts will help find those solutions and build consensus around a responsible path forward.”

Chu said the panel’s work will focus on “solutions rather than ideology, and the best available science will inform their work at every step.”

Steve Frishman, a nuclear waste consultant to the state of Nevada, said it was for the best that Yucca Mountain will not be in the mix. A generation of scientists and policymakers have formed strong opinions pro and con, and it would lead the panel into a morass rather than a new start.

Hamilton and Scowcroft have backgrounds in international relations and national security and not necessarily energy, Frishman observed.

“It probably is good the co-chairs don’t have any background in this,” he said. “That will be useful because they won’t be bringing 20 years of problems with them. They can take a fresh look.”

Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@stephensmedia.com or 202-783-1760.