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For Immediate Release: June 7, 2012
Contact: Rob Thormeyer, 202-898-9382, rthormeyer@naruc.org

States Urge Action on Nuclear-Waste Policies

WASHINGTON—Leadership from Congress and the White House is essential if the country’s nuclear-waste policies are to gain momentum, a key State regulator told Congress today.

In testimony before a Senate subcommittee, National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners President David Wright of South Carolina expressed frustration with the government’s handling of nuclear-waste issues and said Congress and the Executive Branch need to put forth workable solutions that do not overburden consumers.

President Wright testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety. The hearing focused on the early 2012 report from the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future which proposed a series of recommendations for jumpstarting the nation’s stalled nuclear-waste program.

The BRC, appointed by the Secretary of Energy, recommended reforming the Nuclear Waste Fund, which pays for the program through fees assessed to nuclear utilities and their consumers, and developing a consent-based approach for selecting nuclear-waste repository locations.

While the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 remains the law, NARUC agrees with many of the recommendations. President Wright particularly commended the report’s proposals to alter the Nuclear Waste Fund. In fact, doing so is “essential” for most of the BRC’s other recommendations to proceed, he said.

Consent-based siting is also a critical aspect of any new nuclear-waste policy, he said. “Certainly, future siting efforts will have to account for widely divergent demographics/populations as well as unique proposed repository topologies/geologies,” President Wright said. “Since ‘one-size-certainly-does-not-fit-all’ in this context, NARUC agrees that flexibility in approach is a necessary prerequisite to future siting initiatives.”

Still, despite the report and apparent consensus on several key recommendations, unless and until Congress and the Administration put these proposals into law, the nation’s nuclear-waste policy will remain stalled.

The BRC report may proclaim that policymakers “know what we have to do; we know we have to do it, and we even know how to do it,” thus far Washington has shown no signs of actually resolving the problem, President Wright said. “[O]ur assessment is that there are too many people who are content to pass the problem along to future generations and ‘leave the waste where it is.’ It is fitting for the [Blue Ribbon] Commission to call for prompt action developing both consolidated interim storage and beginning the search for a new repository, but we may need public education and outreach to help persuade some who seem to favor the ‘no action’ alternative.”
 

NARUC is a non-profit organization founded in 1889 whose members include the governmental agencies that are engaged in the regulation of utilities and carriers in the fifty States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. NARUC's member agencies regulate telecommunications, energy, and water utilities. NARUC represents the interests of State public utility commissions before the three branches of the Federal government.