Blue Ribbon Mission

Deck: 

Can a broadly based committee resolve the nuclear waste dilemma?

Fortnightly Magazine - July 2010
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In January, the Obama administration appointed a high-powered Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future (BRC) to address one of the nation’s great continuing dilemmas, the management and disposition of nuclear waste.

Delivering his charge to commission members at their organizational meeting, Energy Secretary Stephen Chu set forth their challenge, and gave the commission a two-year time frame to work with. The commission isn’t tasked to site a repository, but rather to look at the whole nuclear fuel cycle, and at what technologies might be available in coming years that will affect that cycle. He wants commission members to review how things should be set up as technology progresses, both to reduce the amount of or the toxicity of the material separated from spent fuel, and to determine how to dispose of what won’t be wanted, the residual material, in the future, both near term and long term. He also asked the BRC to recommend changes to the decision process.

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