ATLANTA – Federal officials held a meeting Monday in Georgia about nuclear-waste storage because of the area’s involvement with the issue.
“We tried to pick regions of the country that have some familiarity,” said John Kotek, acting assistant secretary in an interview with the Augusta Chronicle.
The meeting wasn’t about where to actually store the more than 75,000 tons of existing spend fuel and the 2,000 tons created yearly by the country’s 99 reactors – including two at Plant Vogtle and two under construction there. Instead, the meeting was to get public input on how to decide where to store it.
An independent commission recommended in 2013 that the Energy Department only consider sites where the people living nearby actually wanted it. Previous attempts at a top-down decision have repeatedly stalled when local political opposition mounted.
Canada, Finland, Sweden and France have been successful in getting communities to volunteer, Kotek said, adding that Canada had more than were needed.
In this country, two communities along each side of the Texas-New Mexico line are eager to host the waste because of the jobs and infrastructure improvements that would come with it. Each had representatives at Monday’s meeting pushing for a quick decision.
Kotek pushed back.
“We’re not at the point where we’re looking at sites or volunteers,” he said.
Former Gov. Sonny Perdue led off the discussion by saying only a deliberative approach would ensure a long-term decision that is politically palatable.
“We don’t need a short-term, political decision that could be negated at the next election,” said Perdue, co-chair of the Nuclear Waste Committee of the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center.
When it came to recommendations about the process for picking the site, Kotek came away with multiple suggestions. Rick McLeod of the Savannah River Site Community Reuse Organization said people in South Carolina and Georgia want to want to do the research needed to pick the site and containers, but they don’t want to be a storage site.
Karen Patterson, a former member of the Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board from Aiken, S.C., said community support anywhere would be difficult unless the federal government made a long-term funding commitment.
“Without congressional funding changes, no state is going to want to participate in this,” she said.
Susan Corbett, chair of the South Carolina Sierra Club, called for getting the consent of communities that the nuclear material would be transported through since it has to be moved from its current location at reactors all over the country to an interim site and then again to the permanent site once it’s chosen and constructed.
“We are talking about moving this substance, not once but twice,” she said.
But Kotek said getting consent for transporting is not part of the Energy Department’s goal in the siting process.
Monday’s was the second of three meetings to get suggestions on the siting process. The department will draft a plan for picking the site and seek public comment on the draft.
“This is a decades-long process,” Kotek said.
