Clark Bullard has been a member of the Central Midwest Interstate Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact Commission since it was established in 1984; he was Chairman for 11 years. During the Carter Administration, Professor Bullard served at the US Department of Energy as Director of the Office of Conservation and Solar Policy, and he then worked as a Senior Policy Analyst at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Additionally, he has served on several policy advisory committees for the National Academy of Sciences and the US Congress dealing with nuclear waste management and other energy-related issues.
The Central Midwest Compact consists of the states of Illinois and Kentucky, and as Thor Strong pointed out, the host state, Illinois, was essentially self-selected. I'd like to focus today on what we've learned and the issues to be resolved. But first I'd like to review for you, the three distinct phases of our siting process that are listed here.
On the next slide we start with the Martinsville process. According to 1984 legislation, or 1985, it was a classic decide-announce-defend screening process to identify first 10 sites and then the state had the authority to site it there. The director of the Department of Nuclear Safety, though, put together a very broad-based citizens advisory group and decided to take a very different route, a voluntary siting process. And it was going quite well with 21 counties expressing interest, being reasonably thoroughly mapped to the first level of geological analyses. But then when the potential benefits were described by the state as “up to $1 million a year” in potential surcharges that could be levied, the big counties dropped out because $1 million a year didn't seem like much to them, considering the political strife that they would have to endure. As for people from small counties, county board members asked me, for example, “If this stuff is as safe as you say it is, why is the state going to give us $1 million a year to take it?” But as I look back at the process, that was the point where the Illinois siting process first ran into trouble and very quickly all of those 21 counties had dropped out. Then the City of Martinsville, as a city, not a county, volunteered, and then another county in southern Illinois volunteered, but it later dropped out. So Martinsville was alone and all of the analyses and everything focused on that.
The next slide indicates where the Central Midwest Compact Commission came in. We felt that Martinsville and Wayne County should have access to independent technical expertise so they wouldn't have to take at face value what the state and its contractors were saying. Now remember, we have a very different system in Illinois where the state agency that is the regulator is also the developer of the site. So it's the old Atomic Energy Commission credibility problem that our state agency carried into these siting processes. So we were trying to offset that by giving the local governments an independent source of expertise with some $100,000 grants so that they could hire their own technical experts and their own attorneys; mostly technical experts early in the process. The geological suitability of the Martinsville site was questioned. State geologists objected to IDNS consultants removing the word “aquifer” about 90 times from a report and replacing it with the phrase “water-bearing sand layer.” In the wake of that dispute the legislature stepped in and established an independent siting commission. They gave the siting commission extremely broad authority to decide whether a site was safe or suitable. The siting commission wanted to consider health effects and things of that nature, and the state agency IDNS was uncomfortable with an independent agency having that broad authority. They wanted to constrain it a little more. So during those 70 days of hearings, which stretched over more than a year, the compact commission set up a process by which intervenors could participate in that process with legal and technical expertise with funds from us.
We set it up so that the League of Women Voters received proposals from interested groups who qualified by making the case that their views would be otherwise un-represented or under-represented, or that they just couldn't afford to state their views. These groups were pro and con. The proponent City of Martinsville got about $130,000, as I recall. The People for Responsible Opportunity, an economic development group in the Martinsville area, got about the same amount. I believe the Concerned Citizens of Clark County, the countywide group that was opposing the site, got about $400,000. The three-person commission was chaired by a retired supreme court justice. The commissioners felt after the year and a half long process that without that funding they would really not have had the basis for making a sound decision.
I think we learned something there in Martinsville. Their decision is given on the next slide. All you have to read is the last sentence, basically. But it was a unanimous decision. The other two commissioners were an archeologist who was a former executive director of the state-wide Sierra Club, and the head of the University of Illinois Department of Civil Engineering, who had spent most of his life designing nuclear bomb-proof bunkers and things of that nature. There was technical expertise, there was social science expertise, and there was legal expertise on the Siting commission.
The next slide indicates that what happened immediately after the Martinsville decision at the waning hours of a lame duck legislative session: there was a new siting process put in place. There were not extensive hearings or anything, but basically it was an attempt by proponents of the siting process to get it back on track quickly by fixing the things that they perceived to have gone wrong at Martinsville. So the new legislation set up a task group, which was narrowly constrained to mostly technical issues, to develop the criteria for deciding on safe sites, leaving it to the state to determine issues of public health and safety later in the licensing process. It also eliminated the local veto, which the legislature had put in back when the counties were wanting to get out of the process a few years earlier. So we went from no local veto to putting in a local veto, and now taking it out in 1993.
And the 1993 legislation also put the burden on the public to dispute any licensing findings. Intervenor funding was authorized, but it was not funded and not required. And ultimately, and most importantly, the “AEC problem” was not fixed. So we were heading for a situation where several years from now the state agency, the Department of Nuclear Safety, would have to sit in judgment on a license application that the same agency, through its contractors, had developed. So some things were fixed, and other things were not.
The next slide shows the 1997 legislation here so you can see where we are today. This, I think was initiated by concerns by Commonwealth Edison that we were getting down to very, very small waste volumes, yet the cost of this whole top-down siting process is extremely high and it was being spread over fewer and fewer cubic feet of waste. To my knowledge, people did not conceptually change the type of design that they were thinking of. Actually when you think of 10,000 to 20,000 cubic feet of waste a year, thats only one house full, and maybe could be handled by a small facility that might be only open a week or two a year to accept waste, then closed, monitored, and guarded the rest of the time. But I think the old 200,000 cubic-foot-a-year facility was what everyone was planning and costing out, and the unit costs were looking very high.
In the new process the utilities got what they wanted from the legislature and that is a delay to the year 2012.
The environmental groups also got something. Its interesting that early in the process, back 10 years ago, there were no local grassroots citizens really involved in the process. There were state-wide citizens groups, environmental groups, municipal league and others, but nobody from a neighborhood that really had favorable geology. So what was different this time is that after the Task Group held a very public process over the last few years talking about criteria for selecting sites, there were quite a few people from local areas involved in the 1997 legislative process. They were the ones who insisted on returning to the volunteer process.
The last slide here indicates some lessons learned. We've got some more time on the agenda this afternoon to discuss these in a little more detail. But we certainly learned that volumes can be reduced, and that prices stimulated a lot of technological innovation in the waste processing industry. We also learned that top-down, decide-announce-defend screening and siting processes are extremely expensive. There are volunteer communities out there! We also learned that meaningful public involvement requires a lot of money; for example, the intervenor funding. To counterbalance the $80 million that the state spent on the site, there was half-million dollars spent on intervenor funding during the hearings to present other facets of the story.
You all remember Alvin Weinberg's plea back in 1972 for a nuclear priesthood for the civilian nuclear power industry to be the social institution that looked after the waste for centuries. He said we needed that just like we needed a military priesthood to look over the military aspects of nuclear energy. There are nuclear experts who really want to control the risks and control the process over the long term, and they want to work to provide that safety over the long term. But the key to it all is going to be for those experts to earn the public trust. There have been lots of ups and downs along the way in Illinois but it comes down to the bottom line: trust not only requires technical expertise, but also a fiduciary responsibility to exercise that expertise on behalf of the client. I personally have doubts as to whether an agency like the old Atomic Energy Commission, which has the legislated responsibility for both developing and regulating a facility, can actually earn that trust. I think most other compact regions have already addressed that, but ours has not.
Additional Comments by Clark Bullard
In the Central Midwest, as I said, we have until 2012 now with our new legislation. So how should we intelligently use this time? I think there are three things that we ought to do. And the first one is that a voluntary siting process could and should be developed. It's not going to happen on an artificially fast timetable with guns held to peoples' heads. It has to be done on a timetable that allows for negotiations and the building of mutual trust. Nobody likes to shoulder an involuntary burden. I think we've heard today that almost everything that's happened in the low-level waste business during the last 10 or 15 years has happened voluntarily. Barnwell is open because it volunteered to be open. Envirocare went into business voluntarily. It was pointed out that host states that are content with their position as host states are the ones who were self-appointed. And the ones where we've had strife in compacts, where states have been kicked out or withdrawn from compacts voluntarily, then that's where the problems have been.
I think the issue of compensation that Professor Coates raised today is absolutely key. People do perceive risks associated with low-level waste. They may or may not be right in the eyes of some scientist or some third party, but some people perceive that there would be a stigma to their community that would make it hard for other economic development activities. They perceive some health risks that may or may not be there. Regardless of that, I think we have to compensate people for the risks they perceive, and the first thing we are going to have to do is abandon the idea that there is one best site. Because if there is one best site in Nebraska, or Illinois, or the Central Compact, or any compact, then you can't have compensation in our democratic society. If the government offers that site compensation, it's perceived as a bribe. If the community demands compensation, it's perceived as extortion. Since both of those are publicly unpopular, it paralyzes the process. We've seen it happen in several places.
We have to look for ways to provide a given level of safety through combinations of site geological barriers and engineered barriers. Let's see where that safety can be provided and at what costs, including the cost of compensating people.
I've written a paper [Managing The Risks of Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal] that was presented at the DOE conference in the spring dealing with ways to allocate capacity at sites, and also to fund up front a long-term care fund for retrieval, repackaging, and relocation. I've brought about 20 copies of that along so if you'd like to see it I could give you one later. That is another way of eliminating some involuntary risks. No host state wants to feel like the other states are going to bail out of the compact at some later date if things go wrong.
Another thing we should do in these coming years is reduce uncertainty. Right now there is not much information on what's in the barrels. There's overall information on how radioactive it is. We know how many pounds are there, how many cubic feet there are, but it's hard to find good records on the chemical composition of the waste, the chemical stability of the waste, the biological stability, isotope breakdowns and detailed information like that. When that is unknown, estimates have to made that are pretty high and conservative. When such estimates are made, it's been said that fear-mongers can come in and tell some pretty frightening stories about what might go wrong, and science cannot refute them because the data is not there. We've treated waste like this in our society for a long time. It's something we only know the mass and volume of. It's not like manufactured products where people have an automatic vested interest in knowing the details of the composition. So we should probably tighten up our tracking systems over time now that we have some time.
I spoke about the trust issue this morning. I had also listed a few unanswered questions that we ought to address and I'll touch on a couple of them. Most of them have been raised today, and discussed by others.
The mixed waste issue in Illinois: we're pretending that it sort of doesn't exist. Illinois has a law on the books that said there shall be no mixed waste going into the facility in the Central Midwest region. But both party states and the generators have theoretically the right to send their mixed waste to that facility. So there are things like that that have to be resolved.
People also have to come to terms with whether they're comfortable with reliance 100 percent on geological barriers or whether they are going to give credit for engineered barriers.
But the thing that Ed Helminski raised today is one that is probably more serious. The more serious dimensions of this will probably be debated later. The United States is probably the only country in the world that set up its atomic energy establishment after World War II consciously separate from the military establishment. The civilian Atomic Energy Commission was established outside the Pentagon for a reason. Many other countries still have it together. There have been benefits and disadvantages argued about over the years, and we're arguing about it now when we think about burning Russian plutonium. But I think it has served us well to keep those establishments very separate. If you look in countries where they're together you see the emergence of red-green political coalitions. If you're green you must also be socialist and red. And that has been a natural outgrowth of the combination of the weapons establishment and the civilian power establishment. I'm not sure whether the public is going to see Mr. Helminski's proposal as the first step down that slippery slope. But it will probably be debated someday. My point is that we have the time to debate it.
We also have the time to consider hazard-based classifications, and we have the time to set up regulatory processes where maybe we give the public the benefit of the scientific doubt instead of giving industry the benefit of the scientific doubt. The Food and Drug Administration is a good example of giving the public the benefit of the scientific doubt, where you must prove something safe before is goes on the market. The Atomic Energy Commission was set up almost exactly backwards. You have to prove something dangerous before you back off. EPA was set up the same way. But we're fixing it over the years. So these are the types of things that I think we ought to be using our time to straighten out.
Further comments on trust
We have in the past given the benefit of the doubt to the industry, and therefore set the standards fairly loose, and then we found out later that lead in gasoline is bad for you, or DDT is bad. Whatever the issue was, we have had to continually re-tighten the standards. It's hard to then go into a public hearing saying these standards are right. I've been asked, “How do I know that you're not like the guy who told the GIs it was okay to look at the mushroom clouds?” Whenever you set up a regulatory system that way, and you keep backing down and keep tightening the standards, the credibility of the regulatory institution is steadily eroded. Conversely when you set it up the other way, like FDA has done, and you find out that things are safer, you can adjust to that and you don't destroy the credibility of your agency. Therefore we are turning EPA from one type of organization to the other by saying things like “no liquids in landfills unless you can prove that it's okay”. So there are ways of turning it around and perhaps it's time in the nuclear regulatory arena to start thinking of ways to incrementally move in the other direction. It's the only way we're going to earn back the publics trust.
Additional Comments
[In response to the question “How important do you think it is for the host state to have an absolute veto power over the exportation of waste from the region?”]
In our compact there is the absolute veto power. Since a bankrupt facility operator cannot provide physical security and safety, I think it's essential. That's why our compact was designed to have absolute veto power because if the host state can be outvoted by the other states, well, then there's the risk that the facility in the region won't have the revenues to provide safety.
Now, there are perhaps other ways of addressing that problem, depending on how the liability is written into your compacts, but I'm not really sure how that is. The proposal in the paper that I mentioned that we presented at the DOE conference for a long-term care fund required, I think, about $75 or $100 a cubic foot payment at the time the waste was deposited. The idea was that at the end of the 50-year operation life of the facility that fund would be very large, and that there would be other bonds posted by the facility operator to take care of the first 50 years. So the generators would pay into this fund, which would be really huge at the end of the 50-year life. And it would be so large that it would cover the cost of that facility failing every 50 years for the next 300. Not a very likely event, but we proposed playing it on the conservative side with $100 a cubic foot surcharge, and giving the generator a receipt for that $100. And if the facility performed better than expected in the 55th year and the 60th year and the 70th year, everything was working fine, dividends would be paid out of that fund to the holders of the coupons or their heirs or assignees. That would also provide a way of tracking liability for particular parcels of waste put into the site. These are just some of the possibilities but the veto of exports, I think, is in every compact. I don't know about host state veto, but that could be compensated by other kinds of arrangements between the states.