Becoming a Responsible Ancestor

January 13, 2025 | Source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | by Daniel Metlay

After more than four decades of intense struggle, the United States found itself in an unenviable and awkward position by 2015: It no longer had even the barest blueprint of how to dispose of its growing inventory of high-activity radioactive waste. Under the leadership of Rodney Ewing, former chairman of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, and Allison MacFarlane, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a steering committee composed of a dozen specialists set out to prepare the so-called “reset” report on how to reconstruct that enterprise. In the study’s words: “Reset is an effort to untangle the technical, administrative, and public concerns in such a way that important issues can be identified, understood, and addressed (Steering Committee 2018, 2).”

One of its key recommendations was that a non-profit, single-purpose organization should be established by the owners of the country’s nuclear powerplants to replace the Department of Energy as the implementor of a fresh waste-disposal undertaking.

To appreciate these suggestions, one must first understand how the United States found itself in its current predicament.