Consistent with the mandate issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners v. United States Department of Energy, (Nos. 11-1066 and 11-1068; D.C. Cir. 2013), and notwithstanding the absence of the determination required to be made pursuant to the Nuclear Waste Policy
Act of 1982 (NWPA), as amended, 42 U.S.C. 10222(a)(4), I hereby propose, subject to any

Dear Mr. President:
At your direction, the Secretary of Energy established the Blue Ribbon Commission on
America’s Nuclear Future to review policies for managing the back end of the nuclear
fuel cycle and recommend a new strategy. We are pleased to be serving as Co‐
Chairmen of the Commission, and we are writing to you to highlight an important action
we strongly believe should be reflected in your Fiscal Year 2013 baseline budget
projections.
In our draft report to the Secretary, issued in July of this year, the Commission

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (the Act), established a
step-by-step process for the siting of the nation's first repository for
high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel. The Act gave the Department of
Energy (DOE) the primary responsibility for conducting this siting process.
The first step in the process laid out in the Act was the development by
the DOE, with the concurrence of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), of
general guidelines to be used by the Secretary of the DOE (the Secretary) in

The characteristics of spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste are described, and options for permanent disposal that have been considered are described. These include:
•disposal in a mined geological formation,
•disposal in a multinational repository, perhaps on an unoccupied island,
•by in situ melting, perhaps in underground nuclear test cavities,
•sub-seabed disposal,
•disposal in deep boreholes,
•disposal by melting through ice sheets or permafrost,
•disposal by sending the wastes into space, and

America’s nuclear waste management program is at an impasse. The Obama Administration’s decision
to halt work on a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is but the latest indicator of a policy that has
been troubled for decades and has now all but completely broken down. The approach laid out under
the 1987 Amendments to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA)—which tied the entire U.S. high-level
waste management program to the fate of the Yucca Mountain site—has not worked to produce a

Dear Co-Chairs Hamilton and Scowcroft:
The Obama Administration believes that nuclear energy has an important role to playas America moves to a clean energy future. One of my goals as Secretary of Energy is to help restart America's nuclear industry, creating thousands of new jobs and new export opportunities for the United States while producing the carbon free energy we need to power America's economy.

Dear Secretary Chu:
Thank you for your remarks to the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future at our inaugural meeting on March 25, 2010. Your guidance was both enlightening and invaluable as we establish a plan to fulfill the Commission’s charter.

This report highlights the findings and conclusions of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future (BRC) and presents recommendations for consideration by the Administration and Congress, as well as interested state, tribal and local governments, other stakeholders, and the public.

This technical report provides an updated summary of the waste package (WP) external criticalityrelated
risk of the plutonium disposition ceramic waste form, which is being developed and
evaluated by the Office of Fissile Materials Disposition of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
The ceramic waste form consists of Pu immobilized in ceramic disks, which would be embedded
in High-Level Waste (HLW) glass in the HLW glass disposal canisters, known as the "can-incanister"

The objective of this analysis is to characterize the criticality safety aspects of a degraded Department of Energy spent nuclear fuel (DOE-SNF) canister containing Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) or Oak Ridge Research (ORR) fuel in the Five-Pack Defense High-Level Waste (DHLW) waste package to demonstrate concept viability related to use in the Mined Geologic Disposal System (MGDS) environment for the postclosure time frame.