This report documents the work of one of the most successful Federal advisory committees in the history of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) was established by EPA on September 30, 1993 to provide independent advice to the EPA Administrator on broad, cross-cutting issues related to environmental justice.

In order to promote a sound basis for considering the role of nuclear in climate change, this review spans the technical topics of social and political debate surrounding nuclear energy with a focus on the objective science of these issues including nuclear waste, accidents and overall risk. Novel aspects include the emergence of nuclear energy as being potentially renewable and the antithesis of Fukushima being an argument for the unacceptable risks associated with the use of nuclear energy.

In October 2009, the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (Board or NWTRB) published Survey of National Programs for Managing High-Level Radioactive Waste and Spent Nuclear Fuel.  For each of the 13 national programs studied, the report catalogued 15 institutional arrangements that had been set in place and 15 technical approaches that had been taken to design repository systems for the long-term management of high-activity radioactive waste.

Comments on behalf of Energy Communities Alliance submitted to the U.S. Department of Energy on Draft Consent-Based Siting Process for Consolidated Storage and Disposal Facilities for Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste. 

This handbook was prepared by Energy Communities Alliance (ECA) with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Nuclear Energy, under Cooperative Agreement DE-NE0000006. It does not represent the views of the Department of Energy, and no official endorsement should be inferred. This handbook is an update to the version originally released in March 2012. The authors are Kara Colton, Allison Doman and Seth Kirshenberg of ECA.

The question of whether centralized storage of civilian spent nuclear fuel (SNF) should be part of the federal waste management system as an intermediate step before permanent disposal has been debated for more than four decades. Centralized storage facilities were included as a potential component of the U.S. spent fuel management system in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA), but the NWPA did not identify these facilities as being essential.

NRC's "Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel" includes a short discussion of "What We Regulate"; "How We Regulate"; and links to related information.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), as amended, requires DOE to dispose of spent nuclear fuel and specifies that the only site that may be considered for the permanent disposal of commercial spent nuclear fuel is a geologic repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. However, in 2010, DOE terminated its efforts to license a repository at Yucca Mountain, and Congress stopped funding activities related to the site. Since then, policymakers have been at an impasse on how to meet the federal disposal obligation, with significant financial consequences for taxpayers.

A viral YouTube video recently discussed the age-old question “why don’t we shoot nuclear waste into space?”

It’s a topic we often get asked about on social media.

While the educational video’s cartoonish depictions of nuclear waste as glowing green ooze made some of our subject matter experts cringe, it’s clear that the content creators did their homework.