 Hi everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today to learn about what Congress needs to know about pending nuclear waste legislation. I'm Dan Brissette, the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. ESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental, energy, and climate change policies. We do our best to focus on solutions and emphasize what can be done in response to a warming planet across the full range of mitigation and adaptation strategies. We also have developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in offering on-bill financing programs to their customers. One important educational tool in our toolbox are briefings, like the session today. We also publish a biweekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. And whether it's for policy makers or the public, our goal is always to provide informative, objective, nonpartisan coverage of climate change topics and written materials and on social media. The best way to keep track of it all is to visit us online at www.esi.org and sign up for Climate Change Solutions, the newsletter, and then follow us on Twitter at ESI Online. Today we will take a fresh look at an issue, Nuclear Power Plant Decommissioning, that we first addressed about 18 months ago in May 2019. That briefing turned out to be one of the most popular of the year. And so we're pleased when we discovered a new opportunity to hold a second briefing to call attention to the status of these issues. Nuclear Power brings with it a lot of passion from people who hold a range of positions, pro-NCON. For me, I consider myself to be someone who needs to learn as much as possible about the topic because of what it means today and especially how it will continue to be part of the U.S. energy mix for some time and what that means for our future. According to the 2020 Sustainable Energy Fact Book, which was the topic of a briefing earlier this year held in partnership with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Nuclear Power contributed a very constant 19 or 20 percent of U.S. energy generation for each of the last 10 years. What is notable is not just the consistency year to year, it's also remarkably consistent compared to other sources, while renewable energy and natural gas resources became a bigger part of the mix over that time and coal steadily declined in use. Nuclear Power Plants are big, complicated and expensive. Once one gets built, which is no easy task, it is then with us for a very long time. Because of the rapidly changing economics of competing energy resources, the number of nuclear power plants is on track to become quite a lot lower. Over the next year, 10 years, excuse me, almost 200 nuclear power plants will close while only two are under construction. As that trend plays out, we will need to consider what energy resources, hopefully clean, decarbonized energy resources, have to come online to meet our demand, which is likely to increase as electrification efforts intensify. And most critically, we will need to think very carefully about what to do with all of that waste. Nuclear waste disposal requires a permanent solution. It is too hazardous to move around. It will remain harmful to human health and the environment for thousands of years. And we should never lose sight of the impacts nuclear waste storage has on surrounding communities, which may or may not have much say in decisions of what to put where and for how long. While we're in the early days of the lame duck session of the 116th Congress, there are still pressing issues and there are still proposals pending that would change how we do decommission nuclear power plants and responsibly manage nuclear waste for the long term. And to help you better understand the status of these proposals, let us turn to our expert panelists. But before I turn to our first panelist, let me explain one last bit of logistics, and that is how to ask questions. We are not together in person today. So if you have a question or two, you have two options to ask it. The first is you can send us a message on Twitter at EESI online or you can send an email to EESI at EESI.org. We will do our best to get to everyone's questions during our Q&A after our third panelist presents. And that brings us to our first panelist. Robert Alvarez is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He served as senior policy advisor to the Energy Department's Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Security and Environment from 1993 to 1999. During that time, Bob led teams in North Korea to establish control of nuclear weapons materials. He also coordinated the Energy Department's Nuclear Materials Strategic Planning and established its first asset management program. Before joining DOE, Bob served for five years as a senior investigator for the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Affairs, then chaired by Senator John Glenn and is one of the Senate's primary staff experts on U.S. nuclear weapons program. In 1975, Bob helped found and direct the Environmental Policy Institute, a respected national public interest organization. Bob, welcome to the briefing today. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Thank you. What I plan to do is to provide a baseline discussion about probably the most significant aspect of decommissioning and actual operation of a nuclear power plant. Nuclear power plants are not just about generating electricity. They've also become some of the most significant radioactive waste management operations in the United States. Next slide, please. What are we talking about? Well, after 60 years, U.S. reactors have generated the single largest inventory of spent nuclear fuel in the world, roughly about 20%. The spent fuel in many of the long rectangular assemblies containing tens of millions of fuel rods. The rods contain trillions of irradiated uranium pellets the size of a fingertip. After bombardment with neutrons in the reactor core, about 5% to 6%, the pellets are converted to a myriad of radioactive elements ranging from seconds to millions of years in terms of their half-lives. Standing next within a meter of a typical spent fuel nuclear assembly, which you certainly should not do, is definitely verboten, but guarantee a lethal radiation dose in minutes. Next slide, please. The U.S. Government Accountability Office informed the U.S. Congress, I mean, why should we be concerned about radioactive spent fuel, because it's an ultra-hazardous material. The U.S. Accountability Office informed the U.S. Congress in April of 2017, it quote, spent nuclear fuel can pose serious risks to humans and the environment, and is a source of billions of dollars in financial abilities for the U.S. government. According to the National Council of the National Academy of Sciences, another is a handled and stored property that's material and spread contamination, caused long-term health concerns, humans and death. Because of these extraordinary hazards, we have a federal law, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which first enacted in 1982 and subsequently amended since then, particularly in 1987, that requires this material to be disposed of in a geologic repository to prevent it from escaping a human environment for up to a million years. I gave you an idea of how radioactive we're talking about. These spent fuel contain some of the largest concentrations of artificial radioactive activity in the globe. Spent fuel currently contains roughly about 20 times more long-lived radioactive waste generated by the Nuclear Weapons Program over the last 50 years. Anyway, I won't dwell on the numbers, but it gives you an idea of how creative it is. Next slide, please. This is a comparison, again, to emphasize the importance of the hazard of spent nuclear fuel. CZM-137 is a very important isotope because it makes up roughly about 40% of the spent fuel radioactive inventory. It is particularly dangerous, it's very volatile, and it escapes. It can cause lasting long-term contamination. As a half-life of about 30 years, it is considered not so harmful. None of that, it gives off external penetrating radiation as it decays, and it mimics potassium in the environment. It's taken up in all manner of organic material, particularly the human body, fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, etc. What this graph shows is just how much CZM-137 is contained in one spent fuel pool of the Santa Norfolk-y site on the far right, compared to what was released by Chernobyl on the far left. Chernobyl released an estimated 1.89 million curies of CZM-137, which rendered an area roughly half the size of New Jersey and inhabitable for the foreseeable future. So this is a great deal of concern about Next slide. At the end of 2018, about 82,358 metric tons of spent fuel is currently sort of 119 sites. There are 95 nuclear power plant reactors in 29 states, which generate about 2,200 metric tons of spent fuel each year. There are 38 closed nuclear power reactors in the United States at 30 sites in various stages of decommissioning. About 48 percent of nuclear power spent fuel is stored in about 3,200 dry storage gas, of which 600 are permanently closed sites. This gives you an idea of what's in pools and what's in dry storage. This is just an idea of how much spent fuel is distributed in the United States. I'm not sure you can read this, but the state of Illinois has the largest amount of spent reactor fuel in the United States by virtue of having the largest single reactor fleet. Next slide, please. Heat from radioactivity K of a spent fuel is also a principal safety concern. A few hours after a full reactor core is offloaded from the reactor, it can initially give off enough heat from radioactivity K to match the energy capacity of a steel mill furnace. This is hot enough to melt and ignite fuels reactive zirconium cladding. Zirconium is the cladding that surrounds the uranium. And if any of you are as old as I am, you remember the old-fashioned light bulbs, flash bulbs, the filaments of zirconium is the back and it can spontaneous fire once it are combust like a Roman sparker once it reaches a certain temperature. So it's hot enough to melt and ignite the fuels that are zirconium cladding. The cladding is roughly the thickness of a credit card. And also the heat is so great when you start to put all the spent fuel in one place underground it can actually the heat itself can destabilize the geologic disposal medium. So you have to be careful. So you have to let the stuff cool off long before it can be put in the ground. And after you put it in the ground it may require as long as 300 years of active ventilation. If water in a reactor spent fuel pool is drained by an earthquake or an active malice, it can cause the most catastrophic fire. It can release enough radioactive material to contaminate it. Radioactivity from an accident if it were, for example, to liberate nuclear power plant near Philadelphia. It could give force approximately 8 million people to relocate and result in 2 trillion dollars in damages. My colleagues and I in 2003 formed a working group that put together a study the first time warned about the dangers of these pools draining. The pools are basically holding two to four times more than what their original designs intended. And that they're not subject to the same kind of rigorous containment. They don't have redundant water supplies. They don't have redundant electrical supplies. And there tend to be stored in buildings that are not hardened. So we were concerned at that time after 9-11, what happened? Some were to commit an active malice. And so our initial study basically reported that the consequences of a drainage would be quite severe. It created a great deal of controversy. My colleagues and I were stricken from several Christmas card lists. But the National Academy of Sciences was called into sort of rough read this dispute we were having with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They came out with a report in 2004 where CNRC unsuccessfully tried to suppress which tended to agree with what we had to say. We we believe that the dangers of spent fuel pools can be greatly reduced by ending high density storage and placing as much as possible in the dry cast. This is something that the industry is very much opposed to because it may mean extended down times. Next slide please. Now the other issue associated with storage and disposal is called high burn-up. Over the last 15 or 20 years the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has permitted reactor operators to basically double the amount of time that the fuel can be irradiated in a reactor and this is done by increasing the amount of uranium 235 from about let's say two three percent to four or five percent. And so initially reactors operators refuel the reactor every 12 months now they do it every two years. This fuel tends to contain our larger amount of uranium 235. However there's a great deal of experimental data. The NRC didn't really understand, took a leap of faith about the spenders outside of the reactor once it's used and instead focused on whether it was safe to be used inside the reactor. What we socially learned is high burn-up fuel reduces the cladding thickness. When you irradiate this fuel for twice as long as it does it causes the pellets to swell, causes the cladding to thin out and also forms a form of rust called hydrides which can cause the zirconium cutting to fail and become brittle. The cladding is considered a primary barrier. It's very difficult to transport this stuff and you have to repackage it and not only that high burn-up spent fuel generates much larger temperatures. Recently the nuclear waste technical review board reported that there's some high burn-up fuel out there you would have to sit at the reactor site until the next century to cool off unless we come up with a repackaging regime. Next slide please. Now what I'm getting into is something that Congress is mostly interested in which is the money part. What is the extent of the government liability for example? Well one of the main sources of government liability is a failure to meet the opening date in the 1987 amendment to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act which was the policy I stated that the U.S. government or the Department of Energy itself would be opening a repository on January 31st 1998. They stipulated that a law because the Department of Energy was unable to do this largely for technical reasons. Reactor operators have filed 40 laws and have been compensated for basically violation of contract. Right now the total amount of settlements is about eight billion dollars. Department of Energy has submitted to the total liability to the government for failure to meet the status somewhere close to 36.5 37 billion dollars. Next slide please. Now what's important to understand here in terms of legislation that the Congress faces I'm not going to really discuss it in any legislation in any detail but the fact is that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act it says basically the U.S. government cannot accept title and therefore does not have financial responsibility of missing the start-up date for a repository. The reactor operators were levied to the user fee of no more than one mil per kilowatt hour which generated approximately 40 billion 41 billion dollars now but because of the cancellation of the Yucca Mountain Project and the failure or the inability or refusal of Congress to restart the Yucca Mountain Project this for the funds have stopped largely because of a lawsuit. The cost of consolidated storage which is now before the Congress for a pilot program would have to be borne by the reactor operators unless the government assumes title and so there's legislation proposing to do that but I think you need to be aware that before Congress does this you need to be aware that you might be putting down a down payment on a balloon mortgage. Now this this slide here is just a graphic depiction of how much spent fuel is what are called stranded reactors, reactors that are closed where they've generated the spent fuel or soon to be closed and the orange component of the bar is high-burnup fuel which means that the spent fuel that's high-burnup could stay at that site and be trapped there for many decades. Next slide please. Repackaging is very important and it's something that has not been dealt with very much. You cannot assume and nor there is any strong of technical evidence indicates that the current cast can be just sent over repository as is that are used for the economic convenience of the operator. None of them are licensed for disposal in a repository and that's because of the decay heat, the amount of spent fuel that's there, the cumbersome nature of the of the cast and the fact that there's so many spent fuel rods in there that it poses potential criticality dangers. So for example Yucca Mountain if Yucca Mountain were to be approved there would have to be extensive repackaging to deal with decay heat. Existing large canisters place a major burden on the geological repository handling and placement plus closure. Repackaging expenses rely on the transportability of the canisters, more importantly of the compatibility of the canister with heat loading requirements. Heat is a very, very, very, very nice excuse. In terms of geological disposal the decay heat over thousands of years can cause waste to containers to corrode negatively impact the geologic stability of a disposal site and enhance the migration of the waste over the period of time that's been set by law. Make temperatures in a repository can reach 212 degrees Fahrenheit and it can extend beyond 300 years depending on the geologic medium that's picked. So that means you may be looking at the process of having 300 years of active ventilation which is longer than the time frame that this nation is listed. Next slide please. Costs of repackaging are quite large. There are three types of which the department is called standard transit. One at the cost associated with one boiling water reactor at the in Washington state's Columbia generating station. It would involve opening 120 dry casts and repackaging about 1,860 spent fuel assemblies suitable for disposal. The additional costs range from 272 million to 915 million dollars. So based on the energy department strategic plan to open a repository by the year 28 the per assembly cost would be about per assembly would be about 33,000 for a large stand down to $112,000 for a small stand. You may estimate a cost of managing all of what would be the cost of the assembly. It should be more than the cost to load the assembly in any of the canisters. Next slide please. In October of 2017 I did a look today. I looked at it. I did a study looking at the costs to a single reactor for those costs that are not covered. Right now under the nuclear waste policy act it has to be borne by the rate payer or the reactor operator. And so what I concluded is that for the Columbia generating station the additional cost it would be borne for one reactor for predisposal activities that are not covered under the nuclear waste policy act. None of these funds can be used for example. None of the funds collected to to select a repository can be used. So this is a storage range from about 384 million to about 1.25 billion dollars for a single reactor. These are the kinds of issues the Congress should be aware of and should be asking questions about before they make the plunge about assuming title at the reactor in order to establish a solidized storage facility. Next slide please. I think the basic approach undertaken right now needs to be fundamentally revamped to this of already spent fuel storage in pools. High burn up spent fuel and dry cats and technology risks. Instead of waiting for problems to arise the nuclear regulatory commission and the energy department need to develop a transparent and comprehensive road map. This will get known associated with interim storage transportation repackaging and final disposal of all nuclear fuel. It's going to be high burn up. Otherwise it will be better on diesel that I consider to be leaps face relative to nuclear waste storage. Leaps that are setting a stage for a large unfunded radioactive balloon mortgage payment in the future. That concludes my presentation. Thank you very much. Thanks Bob. Thanks for your presentation. We got off to a bit of a late start. We started a little bit past two o'clock and so if we get close to three o'clock and we still have some questions that we need to get to we're not going to event ourselves from spilling over another 15 minutes or so into the three o'clock hour. So fair warning. Hopefully you'll be able to stick with us for until about three fifteen or so but we want to make sure that we have time to to follow up on the presentations and also allow our next two panelists plenty of time for them. So sorry for the last minute scheduling update but I hope you understand and agree that it's a good idea. Our next panelist is Don Hancock. Don is director of the Nuclear Waste Program at Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque where he has worked since 1975. He has been actively involved in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant or WIPP or WIPP in New Mexico and nuclear waste issues nationwide including consulting with states, tribes and citizen groups on repository and consolidated storage sites. He has testified before Congress and state legislative committees and he's written many articles on the subject. Don, thank you for joining us today. I'll let you take it away. Thank you very much and I appreciate everybody's attention today. As you can see from my title slide the focus of my presentation is on what I consider to be more than 33 years of failure of legislation to meet the objective of having multiple operating repositories and at least one consolidated storage site. Next slide please. So Bob has described the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. I want to highlight three principles. One is spent nuclear fuel and high level waste are a national problem that according to the law require safe and environmentally acceptable methods of disposal. Second, the federal government is responsible for spent nuclear fuel and high level waste disposal and geologic repositories. Third, the generators are responsible for interim storage and for paying for the disposal into the nuclear waste fund. Fourth principle that I'll also talk about relates to federal, state and tribal relations. Next slide please. So the law has very specific timeframes and activities that were supposed to happen. As you can see there are dates for the Department of Energy to nominate sites for the first repository to select three sites for monitored retrievable storage, a government consolidated storage site. The president was supposed to recommend the first site by March 31st of 1987 and following DOE nominating sites for a second repository. The president was supposed to recommend to Congress a second repository site three years later in 1990 and as Bob has already mentioned the first repository was to be operating by January 31st of 1998. Next slide please. The law also included these provisions related, numerous provisions related to notifying states and tribes, how they would participate in the process, funding for their participation and the discussions about repository and MRS sites and after the presidential recommendation states or tribes depending on where the facility was located, either repository or MRS could submit a notice of disapproval. Though that notice could however be overridden by a majority vote of each House in Congress. Next slide. So the reason for this discussion about federal interaction is because of the earlier history prior to the enactment of the Naked Waste Policy Act. The Atomic Energy Commission, DOE's predecessor organization designated, chose the first repository site near Lyons, Kansas which they said would be operating by 1975. However because of technical problems with the site the state of Kansas strongly opposed it and that site was abandoned. Thereafter there were investigations looking at sites in other places no other state objected. So by 1979 an interagency review group on Naked Waste Management discussed various options about how states and tribes would participate and what their ultimate decision-making role could be. So one concept was a state veto, another concept was consultation and concurrence, but later that same year in 1979 Congress authorized the first geologic repository in the United States which is not for spent fuel or high-level waste. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico which is for defense transuranic waste and what the state of New Mexico was offered was consultation and cooperation. Next slide. So during the 80s the Department of Energy was proceeding with first and second round sites and MRS. There was a lot of opposition from citizens and states and tribes so in 1987 Congress said this isn't working and so they stopped the characterization work at in Hanford Washington, Death Smith in Texas and said Yucca Mountain would be the only repository to be considered. They also in that amendments prohibited any further activity in the second repository sites and any site-specific activity which essentially ended the second round sites and the law also annulled and revoked the DOE decision to do the MRS at an Oak Bridge, Tennessee. So what the law did say is that well we'll offer benefits financial and otherwise to Nevada or if there were DNMRS site and establish the Office of Nuclear Waste Negotiator which was to go to states and tribes and try to see if they could find consenting states, states that were willing to negotiate some sort of agreement to host other than Nevada to host a repository in another state or an MRS site. Any such agreements had they been achieved would have required approval by an act of Congress. Next slide. So there were two people who were selected nominated by the president confirmed by the Senate to be nuclear waste negotiators. They engaged in a pretty aggressive process over five years to try to find state or tribe willing to volunteer for a repository or an MRS site. They couldn't find anybody. There were grants. The negotiator did issue grants to a number of tribes and some counties to study who had agreed to study the possibility of a MRS type facility. Next slide. So that led to what we're now calling more recently a private consolidated storage site. One result of the negotiator process is that some leaders of the Skull Valley Band of Ghostshoot in Utah and numerous utilities got together to say we would do a private consolidated storage site in Utah. They went through the licensing process in 2006 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensed that site despite strong citizen state objection and even congressional objections. Later that year so the license was issued but later that year the BLM refused a right-of-way to allow transport into the site. The Bureau of Indian Affairs refused to prove the lease between the tribe and the utilities so private fuel storage is licensed that it was never constructed or operated. Later on over the last four years two other private companies Holtec in New Mexico and integrated storage partners with the waste control specialist site in West Texas have proposed consolidated storage sites which are currently in an NRC licensing process. Again there's very strong opposition by the overwhelming majority of people who've been commenting on those proposals as well as opposition from state officials notably including the governors of New Mexico and Texas. Next slide. So while Congress has not changed the authorization of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of course each year Congress does appropriate money and for the 27 years after the enactment of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act Congress appropriated about 13 billion dollars for work under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and for Yucca Mountain. However no funding has been provided for Yucca Mountain since 2010. Instead during that time usually generally up until last year the House Energy and Water Appropriations has included some funding for Yucca Mountain to try to continue Yucca Mountain but the Senate bill has not included any funding for Yucca Mountain. Instead the Senate has proposed since 2013 each year essentially amending the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to allow funding for DOE to fund a private consolidated storage site. Next slide. So that means where we are is that since Congress hasn't funded Yucca Mountain and hasn't funded consolidated storage that was also that was still the case in 2020 last year. No funding and so that's today as we speak also the situation because the continuing resolution that was passed in September that runs through December 11th still has no funding. For this fiscal year we're in 2021 the House bill again no funding for Yucca Mountain no funding for private consolidated storage it does include 27 and a half million dollars 20 million of it is intended to start a federal interim storage consent-based process sort of an MRS kind of process. The Senate bill that was released on Tuesday of this week again has no funding for Yucca Mountain it also has 27 and a half million dollars but for different purposes it again has a section 306 which would change the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to so that up to 10 million dollars could be provided for private consolidated storage and then another 17 and a half million dollars for other storage activities. Next slide. So based on that history I want to raise five conclusions. The first one is that pretty clearly administrations congresses in the nuclear industry failed to implement the 1982 law and since 1987 Congress has not adopted new legislation authorizing anything else. Thirdly what happened has happened with commercial spent fuel and Bob has talked about this in 1987 there was about 16,000 metric tons stored now it's 85,000 or more stored at operating and decommissioned sites. Fourthly it seems clear that no state or tribe will consent to hosts the only repository or consolidated storage site and fifth importantly in my view legislation for publicly accepted technically sound waste storage disposal have not been introduced. Last slide. This is my contact information. I'll be pleased to answer questions after Diane now talks about proposals for changing authorization. Thank you. Thank you Don and thanks for the great presentation. Our third analyst Don just mentioned her first name Diane. Diane Derigo is the Radioactive Waste Project Director at Nuclear Information and Resource Service. She has degrees in chemistry and environmental studies and her work history includes analytical and organic chemistry with a focus on the pollutants in the Great Lakes. She has also worked as a community organizer researcher at public interest and environmental groups. She's closely tracked nuclear waste issues for decades including high level and so-called low level which I don't think really exists commercial and weapons waste. She has repeatedly challenged state, national and international moves to deregulate nuclear waste that will allow it to be made into everyday household items dumped as regular trash. Diane thanks very much for joining us today. I'm looking forward to what you have to say. Thank you. I'm Diane Derigo, Nuclear Information Resource Service and I think the point has been made in the previous presentations especially Bob's that the irradiated fuel and we call it irradiated it's also referred to as spent is actually very very hot. These are pie charts from the Department of Energy and that bottom one is radioactivity. The whole pie is all the radioactivity in the nuclear power and weapons fuel chain. The black is the commercial irradiated nuclear fuel so over 90 or 95 percent of the radioactivity from nuclear power and weapons is in the irradiated fuel or spent fuel that is now targeted to move on roads, rails and waterways if legislation passes to move it to a permanent or supposedly interim site and it also means that it needs to be taken we need to take better care of it where it is at at the reactor sites. Just a brief background here is that Yucca won't work for technical, moral, political, economic, legal, environmental, justice reasons. Yucca Mountain is a non-starter and I don't have a lot of time to go into that but it's a violation of the Ruby Valley Treaty of 1863 with the western Shoshone. If we were to go back into licensing as one or more of the bills before us in Congress would direct we're throwing good money after bad they're saying a billion 100 billion to complete the processing and opening the licensing and opening of the site and then two to three billion per year to make it happen. So Yucca is it was canceled in 2010 and it should stay canceled and we should move on. The next idea that came out of the Blue Ribbon Commission but has been around in the past is supposedly interim storage. It's referred to in the existing federal legislation as MRS or monitored retrievable storage. Before that it was called AFR away from reactor storage and it needs to be, well what it would be is a place to bring the waste supposedly in roomly and the current law requires that waste can't go to a supposedly interim site unless a permanent site is operating and the title to the waste doesn't transfer from the private owners to the federal government and the Department of Energy and yours and my taxes until it goes to a permanent site. So what the consolidated storage does some of the bills do is to allow the title to transfer before it goes to a permanent site. Bob mentioned how dangerous the waste is. It would mean a lot of transportation. Each container has more cesium in it than was released by the Chernobyl accident and I just have a chart here that shows a map here that shows where the cesium spread in the Chernobyl accident. Bob gave you numbers about amounts. I'm showing you what the accident led to devastation and some of these areas are permanently evacuated. So the point is that the canisters that would be used that are used to store and that are being proposed to move the waste really do need to have better integrity than they do right now. Some of the risks of consolidated storage includes flowing the progress toward finding permanent isolation, spreading the radioactivity across the country on the roads and rails through our communities through most of the congressional districts 300 of the 435 and it brings us no closer to a permanent solution for it. The canisters are both thermally and radioactively hot. This is a infrared so we're looking at the heat in an irradiated fuel train cask as it's moving so it's not the radioactivity but the casks do give up radioactivity. If they had enough shielding to block all the radioactive emissions they'd be way too heavy to move. So there's a compromise there and the waste is moved in containers that have a legal level of emission or radioactivity coming off as surface shine. Moving the waste was projected would take about 40 or 50 years to take 70,000 metric tons out to Yucca Mountain. One of the bills would raise the allowable amount for Yucca Mountain if it were to be resumed to 110,000. The amounts for the Texas and New Mexico proposed sites that were mentioned previously are 40,000 and over 173,000 metric tons. So we would have waste moving mostly from reactors in the eastern part of the state of the country to proposed sites out in the west. As I said the Texas site is planning a full operation to take 40,000 metric tons of irradiated nuclear fuel and the whole tech site in New Mexico over 173,000. So together that's more than three times the amount of waste that was targeted at Yucca, that Yucca's maximum limit is. And so that means we'd have if these were fulfilled three times more waste moving it either means it's going to take more than the decades that were previously expected or we're going to have more per day or per week than would go there. And as we continue to make more waste we're guaranteeing more shipments either one time to a permanent site or twice once to an interim and then to a permanent. The transport routes pretty much would be all the major train tracks. The plan is at this point to move it by rail because you can take heavier loads by rail but there would have to be barging and heavy load trucks to get it to the rail heads and we're talking about barging in the Great Lakes and in oceans rivers wherever the reactors are that don't have access to rail lines. The Yucca Mountain proposal the Department of Energy and the state of Nevada put together maps of proposed potential routes and as I said this included both roads and rails and we're talking in the teens of thousands so for 70 000 metric tons maybe in the range of 15 000 shipments and again it's through more than 75 percent of the congressional districts and each of them with that amount of radioactivity we've previously described. Accidents are going to happen accidents do happen there have been many accidents that have happened that are much more severe than the criteria on which the canisters are based. So the canisters are certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and they have to meet certain criteria and these are in the federal regulations at 10 CFR Code of Federal Regulation 71 and some of those criteria that the the transport forecasts have to meet are below the level of severity that they will encounter in either routine shipments or especially in accident scenarios so this isn't a talk on the transport dangers but that's a very important issue to not be dismissed as you're looking at this legislation and then the Texas Council on Environmental Quality did a report and one of the things they pointed out is that terrorism or sabotage, deliberate attacks on these shipments are a possibility and what we're talking about now is taking this massive amount of waste that's at each site sitting there in storage and needing better storage at the reactor by the way and putting it on the roads and rails so the containers aren't really good enough for where they are now and now we're talking about moving them at 60 miles an hour across the country or faster on trains to sites that are supposedly in a room. We're adding one more sacrifice area to those that we already have. Let's see yeah so at reactors well okay so containers for transport as I said are not designed though there's been a push for better storage of the waste at those sites and Bob mentioned the need for recontainerizing the waste before it goes to a permanent repository and the only way to do that is through remote control so pools or dry storage or dry transfer facilities will be needed and pools are being dismantled and there are no dry transfer facilities so in addition to planning for better storage at reactors where it's stored now we've also got to think about how it's going to be recontainerized and monitored for cracks and leaks and other potential problems especially as the canisters age. Hardened on site storage is a concept that has been adopted by organizations across the country in all 50 states to have better secure storage of the waste at the at the reactors where it is now and there's a development of concepts for the minimum requirements for storage requiring for example venting the canisters are designed to vent and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has decided we don't have to monitor for the radioactivity coming off of the canisters. The NRC is generally reducing the amount of regulatory oversight once a reactor closes yet we've got the whole inventory of all the waste that's been generated throughout the time of the reactor operation sitting there and absolutely needing control. Another extremely important aspect of all this is environmental justice. All three of the proposed sites right now the Yucca Mountain site is on western Shoshone sacred lands violating the Ruby Valley Treaty of 1863 in order to proceed with it. The two sites in Texas and New Mexico are in communities that are largely Latinx and as Don mentioned there's opposition at all of these sites and that needs to be respected. We've got to stop the business as usual of sending the worst radioactive hazardous and other dangerous facilities to communities of color. It's just it's time to move on if that hasn't been made clear in the last year or two I don't know when it's going to be. So there are bills in Congress they deal with the nuclear waste issue. HR 2699 and S2917 is the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2019. It would legalize so I mentioned earlier it's been mentioned MRS Monitored Retrievable Storage. The title doesn't transfer until it goes to a permanent site so if we've got an interim either MRS or CIS site what these laws would do is to enable the title transfer to take place before it goes to a permanent site so we as the taxpayers then become responsible for it sooner and so what all three of these bills HR 2699 and S1234 in the Senate and HR 3136 would do is to allow that title transfer to take place before a permanent repository. The bill the S1234 would set up a new administration to site repository and an interim site and it would require consent but not for facilities that are already in the licensing process. It's okay is the Department of Energy to change the standard contracts to take title and liability and it restarts the light I'm sorry yeah that's for a 1234. Jumping back to 2699 and 2917 those would restart the Yucca Mountain Licensing process which as I said is throwing good money after bad there are over 200 contentions against the licensing by the state of Nevada and the western Shoshone community organization. The S3136 focuses specifically on consolidated and interim storage making it legal and directing the Department of Energy to enter into a development of either a federal or non-federal consolidated and interim storage. The last bill I've listed here is just come up it is you can't see my slide 8258 it would not only encourage consolidated and interim storage but also reprocessing which makes the waste problem even worse chops it up dissolves it and spreads it around and is a major proliferation weapons proliferation risk and it would also push for advanced new reactors which means more waste. The bills that I'm going to summarize those the bills that are likely to come up in lame duck Don mentioned the appropriations there's a nuclear energy leadership act which is not specifically on waste but it would lead to making more waste because it would subsidize new nuclear reactors and one of the things it does is to allow federal agencies to pay higher than market value for the electricity so we could have our federal tax dollars be subsidizing nuclear power over more competitive renewables so this act would make more waste and it is something that we have heard could be moving in the by attaching to the national defense act authorization act which is a must pass and then we have a couple of bills that I wanted to mention that are important the stranded act that's the one at the bottom here there's a version of it in both the house and the senate it would provide funding to communities that are basically have closed reactors and still have the waste for indefinite amount of time so it would provide them with some amount of compensation for for that the compensation is incorporated into the nuclear plant decommissioning act of 2020 which is good because it makes an effort to enable the state and the local communities the tribes to have greater involvement in the decommissioning process at this point the nuclear regulatory commission pretty much ramrods whatever it wants it's between them and the utility and it's really hard for local people to have any input so this would set up a process for the nuclear regulatory commission to consider some of the concerns and interests of the community in which it's located and the nuclear waste informed consent acts are ones that would require consent before nuclear sites could be put in place I wanted to mention the radiation exposure compensation act and the importance of having that be voted on in the senate and the house judiciary committees this December so that it can be voted on and that the compensation to people downwind from the government nuclear projects bomb testing and uranium workers who worked within the uranium industry after 1971 are not being compensated for their services and their health effects from government actions with radioactivity this would extend the existing act until 2040s and it would expand it to cover more people that were not covered in the original act so the push thereby the advocates of that bill is for the senate in the house judiciary committees to to vote on those they've been bottled up in committee for years and the whole act is going to expire if they don't proceed so let's see I have one more thing I was asked to alert people to the very large lies about supposedly very low level radioactive waste the nuclear regulatory commission the nuclear industry other federal agencies DOE EPA have all been pushing over the decades to allow some of the nuclear waste from nuclear power and weapons to be deregulated and allowed to go into regular garbage recycling hazardous sites incinerators places that are not licensed for nuclear activities and this is about the 14th or 15th time that it's come up and the acronyms have changed over the years from de minimis to below regulatory concern and now they're calling it very low level waste even though the amount of waste that could be deregulated and sent to landfills that are not licensed for nuclear is pretty much all the waste except the irradiated fuel that the rest of this discussion has been on it would enable the department I'm sorry the nuclear regulatory commission would at the request of a solid waste facility a hazardous facility give them exempt specific exempt authority to take nuclear waste and that site according to the proposal right now would be able to emit as much radioactivity it's not licensed but it could give up as much radioactivity as an operating nuclear reactor or an operating radioactive waste disposal site so that is what's before us I'm hoping Congress will step in to stop that if it isn't stopped on its own and I look forward to questions and discussion thank you so much thank you Diane one word comes to mind after listening to the three of your presentations and that word is yikes this is a big problem and we have to do something about it and seems like congress might be the group of people that that could make the most difference if they could only we have we're going to go about 15 minutes extra so apologies to those in our audience who you know maybe have a conflict but just as a reminder this full briefing the archive all of the materials and a slew of additional materials from our panelists will be available pretty soon after we conclude today you can find that all at www.esa.org so if you miss anything or if you want to go back and listen to something again just as a reminder everything is available we've been doing very well with questions by email and by twitter so thanks to everyone in our audience for that if you would like to try to get one in before we conclude today the best way to do it is to follow us on twitter at EESI online or send us an email www excuse me EESI at EESI.org I almost gave the website for the email address but they're different things so we have some questions and I'm going to start with two that I thought were really interesting because they help I think they'll help us understand a little bit about sort of the risk of inaction beyond what your presentation's already covered the first asks about what are the radiological consequences of a loss of integrity of a spent fuel cask or canister and based on your presentation Diane I'll add a second part of that question how does it vary based on whether uh based on where it's stored or how long it's been stored or how it's transported and Bob we'll get back to you will be the first opportunity to answer and then we'll move through Don and Diane after that well I think the nuclear regulatory commission has not done a serious quantitative study of what would happen of a major cast failure they have provided some information to emergency responders for modeling purposes in terms of emergency response and they modeled a an accident not an accident but an act of malice involving someone placing a shape charge a substantial amount of season would be released wouldn't know what would not be as much as spent fuel pool fire but it would be substantial about 34,000 carries so you know the point that I think we need to understand is that other nations particularly Germany and Switzerland have done have been much more careful and cautious about storage we've they experienced a lot of NATO jet crashes during during the 80s and decided to have enough of this so what the Germans and Swiss have done they heavied up their switch yards they had another foot of containment on their reactor domes and they placed their spent fuel into hard dry hardened storage facility the spent fuel was spermed or placed in the buildings thanks Don and Diane do you have anything else you'd like to add to sort of what the consequences of this might be and how it might vary based on where the material is stored or transported well I guess two things just really quickly one if there was any serious accident it would be a major national and international concern and the problems are not only the kinds of things that Bob showed with his slide of limerick and has talked about but the psychological the trauma consequences that that would have on people nearby and otherwise and the second point is the transportation issue which Diane also mentioned again an accident there in transportation would be an uncontained situation as opposed to at a power plant where in theory there are people who are used to or in fact are people who are used to trying to deal with the fuel whereas transportation could be either in a big city or a rural area so the consequences again could be serious in terms of contamination and the long-term effects could be bad both health and environment but also psychological and depending on how much damage is done the containers are big and they're heavy and robust but they are not designed to withstand a fire longer than a half an hour or above 1475 and there was an analysis done by radioactive waste management associates of if a radioactive cask were in the baltimore tunnel fire and i believe it was in the range of a hundred people would die not maybe immediately but with the radioactivity that's spread around and the amounts of damage costs of damage would depend on where it's spread you also have some canisters that only have four six fuel assemblies and then there's other that have as many as 37 so how much of the radioactivity is in the container and how much gets out before there's some kind of stoppage of it if it were to fall into a body of water there have been there are criteria for designs that should only be in water for an hour or maybe 65 hours but the containers are extremely heavy and so would the facilities be able to get there locate and pull it out in time so in the slide i had quoted from a study for the nevada nuclear waste project office that cleanup cost could exceed six hundred and twenty million dollars in a rural area and in an urban area it could cost up to nine point five billion to raise and rebuild the most heavily contaminated square mile now considering that there's no safe dose of radioactivity if you're spreading out radioactivity that is as enormous as we've got we're not even going to know all the cancers that they're still fighting over how many cancers are resulting from the Chernobyl accident so there would be potentially immediate problems for emergency responders or people in the vicinity and it could be that available on seats and maybe just some gets out or it could be that there's there are different scenarios for how the radioactivity could get out but the consequences could be very severe and it may not be a very high risk but the more shipments we've got the higher the risk and we're talking now in the thousands and thousands and thousands of shipments over 30 40 50 years just to a temporary site and then again to a permanent so we're we're setting ourselves up for some disasters well thank you for that um that was really helpful um another this one is going to be more of a grab bag so if you have an answer to it well we don't necessarily have to go through the whole panel but if you have anything we'd love to have your thoughts on it this one is allows for a little bit of imagination and some estimation and the question is if the bills discussed enable the Department of Energy to take title to the waste so it can be shipped to consolidated interim storage facilities do any of you have an estimate um even if it's just within an order of magnitude what the potential liability or exposure would be for the federal government sure uh depending on the size of the of the storage site he has done some best evolving there's very same people that are seeking a license to establish such a facility and the high end of the cost is about 23 billion the low end is probably on the order of seven billion dollars um Don or Diane do you have any other thoughts about putting that in um putting that in context I think those those are are are good estimates that we have right now again it depends on whether everything works perfectly or not in the case of the three sites that have been considered private fuel storage that I talked about and the Texas and New Mexico sites there will be major conflicts if the proposal is to go forward with states and and potentially also people along the transportation routes so that could have significant liability questions as well as as well as uh delaying things etc um I would uh go ahead Bob one thing that I it's not clear to me about this legislation is that these reactors as a whole generate about 2200 metric tons of spent fuel a year so when you assume title at the reactor does that mean the federal government is going to be responsible for building a whole dry cast and managing the waste as it comes out of the reactor in addition to making sure it can be safely transported to a site the government I have to pay for and I don't know whether that's that distinction has been drawn at all well that was actually what I was uh I was gonna make that there are three big pots of money here um the uh private companies that are building consolidated storage want to go after they want to go after decommissioning funds to the extent that they can they want to go after the damages that have been uh given to the private owners of the fuel because of the the legal decision that there was no 1998 repository so they want to get access to that to those funds and then the nuclear waste fund which was designed primarily for permanent disposal and want to get at that so we have things that need to be done with these way with the nuclear reactors themselves are all waste they need decommissioning uh the the permanent repository is something that needs to be sought and if the money ends up being waylaid for consolidated storage then it could take away from the other important activities that are that the money's been set aside for uh Don did you have something yeah and just one other point when you talk about liability the assumption on consolidated storage is it would be temporary since there is no repository the liability would last a lot longer because everybody agrees including congress going back to 1982 that the permanent disposal is not leaving it on the surface someplace where clearly you would have problems so that would that would again the federal government would have title at the waste at the reactor or taking it to a consolidated site which won't work long term so again what the ultimate cost would be of that have really not been calculated but would be enormous thank you um this is going to be the last one and again we're going to treat it a little bit of a as a grab bag and it's a sort of a mix of a bunch of different questions and Diane build on something that you covered in your presentation which was sort of the environmental justice considerations that this issue you know brings up constantly and sort of specifically how communities are impacted so as far as last words do any of you have any thoughts about if any of the legislation that you've all described today have the kinds of environmental justice provisions that you would like to see or if there if this is a need for congress to pay you know extra attention to and then second um as far as communities go um are there any fair ways for communities to be compensated to the extent that they're hosting their sort of because it's there already or because they may choose to host um nuclear waste and i'll send that out to the group and anyone has any thoughts well um go ahead don't so so a couple of things one is as Diane mentioned in the and talking at the end about the radiation exposure compensation act um there have been environmental justice issues historically in terms of who's contaminated and who's not compensated so that certainly needs to be addressed in terms of what needs to be done um as i said my last conclusion was there hasn't even been introduced a comprehensive storage disposal bill that deals with all of these issues the liability questions the the participation questions the environmental justice questions etc so this is this is going to be a very complicated problem we've had 33 years of not doing it it's going to take a while to get good legislation and to get it passed and to then implement it um i guess the other point i want to make is the original nuclear waste policy act was clear that there needed to be multiple repositories one of the ways that would need to happen i think is to have multiple repositories so it's not being put on any one state any one tribe any so there would there hopefully would not be those kinds of environmental justice issues of we're picking a site and choosing somebody as for example was done 1987 with yucca mountain and as diane said western shoshone land bob were you going to say something i think that yeah i think that if everything went swimming me well in terms of the development of a consolidated energy source that i think that the barrett truth the raw truth said a great deal of these spent fields are going to be trapped at these sites or in an definite period of time after the reactor shut down and when the reactor shuts down the communities you lose their tax space you lose their funding for their schools for their police for their fire pressure and there has to be some way to deal with that we dealt with it in terms of the closure of the new weapons sites in the late 1980s but these were sites owned by the government so it was relatively straightforward but there are there needs to be somebody to some way to address this fact uh don also mentioned there's multiple sites the original premise of the nuclear waste policy act in 1982 was based on the concept of regional equity congressman yudall in particular was very instrumental in making sure there'll be multiple repositories why should one state which does not have any draw any benefits from nuclear power in terms of generation become the end of a radioactive waste funnel because they're in a remote location out west and that's the original law set forth is that however is an amount east of the united states it's provoked such a political outrage right a year before the 1988 elections in the dead of night congressman swiss and picked yucca mountain and took everything off the table so in regard to um some compensation i'm not saying it's enough but it's a beginning the stranded act which is uh s19 85 and hr 5608 uh is designed to provide some compensation for communities with closed reactors and uh hr 8277 and i don't know the senate bill number if it has one yet for the nuclear plant decommissioning act of 2020 those would uh that takes in the stranded act compensation and also adds to the decommissioning process more influence from or input from the local community i'm not saying that's the answer but that's that's a beginning of looking at something that really does need to happen with regard to is there an amount that is payable i think that's part of what the nuclear waste negotiator that down was talking about i think it was you don that talked about the nuclear waste negotiator trying to find a state or a tribe that would volunteer to take the waste and they were offering increasing amounts of money for getting more and more involved and committed to it and in the end nobody wanted to to bite the apple completely um there's a moral dilemma with obviously poor communities are more desperate for projects to happen and so they might feel that they have to take some amount of money um however there's also uh the the impact that this is going to have on existing vibrant communities uh there are uh cattle farmers and pecan growers and oil and gas companies in the texas new mexico area that have a go of growing economy and they don't want to have this uh brought in on it um however uh a lot of the people in those communities are poorer and in in uh nevada as well but regardless they've said no so what does it take to get a community to say yes um one of the things that's been proposed is that instead of congress being so heavy-handed and superseding state and local laws and regulations that they actually take away the exemptions from uh nuclear they're exempted from a lot of the other environmental laws uh and if we take those away and allow states to have greater regulatory authority and make the facility meet the existing sometimes even inadequate but better than we've got going environmental protections that there might be more openness to having such a facility or facilities and i would also i didn't mention it i'm thinking my talk about the environmental justice impacts but most of the a lot of the transport routes go through poorer communities and so you're not only having the destination before communities but also the routes going there um the waste needs to be moved once to a permanent isolation and not routinely back and forth to the least common denominator great well thanks that's a good place to end and um sorry that we went a little long but i think it was worth sticking it out a little bit to get to um my answers to some of those questions and i'm especially glad that we had time to to sort of talk through some of those environmental justice considerations um we're going to end there thanks to everyone who joined us today um we had a great discussion and as a reminder if you missed anything or if you want to go back and review slides or information or um we also have a bunch of other resources that our panelists have provided the best way to do that is to visit us uh online at www.esi.org if you have a moment we'd really appreciate your help we have a survey there's a link on the screen right now if you have two minutes or less to to log in and share with us what you thought suggestions ideas we're always looking for feedback and we're always doing our best to incorporate that feedback into the next set of briefings speaking of next set of briefings we have a three-part mini series next week on transportation issues we're going to be looking at aviation transit and ports from the perspective of climate change and what those sectors are contributing to emissions reductions and what the potential is so hopefully you'll have a chance to join us um one last plug for climate change solutions it's our biweekly newsletter the best way to stay in touch and up to date with everything that we're doing and i could never stop without thanking all the people behind the scenes who helped make this work so thanks to Troy and Curtis who helped us with the technology thanks to our friend Steve who helped pull the briefing together and thanks to Omri and Dana my colleagues here at EESI who were busy behind the scenes pulling it off um we'll go ahead and end there i hope everyone has a great weekend and um take care and hope to see you next week for our three-part transportation series have a great afternoon have a great weekend