Nevada’s solar regression appalls overseas champions of renewable energy

By Judy Treichel

Tuesday, July 5, 2016 | 2 a.m.

Nevada isn’t the only place in the world focused on the use of renewable energy and also the disposal of highly radioactive waste. I recently attended an energy summit in Sweden where European officials and academics gathered to discuss both of those issues in a conference directed at “Ethics in Decisions on Energy.”

Making decisions based on ethical sense was certainly a concept to explore for this Nevadan. It’s playing out in Finland, for example, which is on its way to becoming the first European country to willingly provide a repository for irradiated fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. A site was chosen near two of the country’s nuclear power plants, and the conditions for building and operating the repository were worked out with the community, which strongly supports nuclear power plants. The design of the facility is based on one that is underway in Sweden, where a repository is also planned in another reactor-friendly community.

The Finnish facility is licensed for construction, but studies on design optimization are ongoing and questions remain about the adequacy of copper canisters that both countries plan on using to store the nuclear material. Both deep geologic repositories would be mined in granite and canisters placed in individual boreholes within the rock tunnels. If the containers cannot be shown to perform as hoped, both the Swedish and Finnish repository programs could be delayed.

All other repository programs in the world are in early stages in which programs and policies are being developed to attract communities to voluntarily host them. In the U.S., the Department of Energy is trying to develop a similar strategy for consent-based siting of a disposal site. The energy department says Yucca Mountain, outside of Las Vegas, is unworkable because of public opposition. Members of Congress from states that have expended nuclear power plant fuel rods are hoping the 2016 elections bring more like-minded politicians to Washington to try to revive the use of Yucca Mountain as a repository, so our battle is not over.

Many of the participants at the conference were familiar with Yucca Mountain and the long-term battle among the federal government, the commercial nuclear industry and Nevada. They found it amusing and amazing that those efforts to force us to take the nations’ waste were continuing. In the presentations about the ethical considerations surrounding energy choices and the imposition of risks on the public, it was inconceivable to many that Nevada still had to be waging this war.

A number of impressive young people at the gathering suggested that the nuclear waste discussions were focused too much on technology and not enough on social issues, and they needed to involve young people in problem-solving. They say an uncertain and likely irreversible quick-fix decision on how to store radioactive waste leaves them and future generations at risk, when continued monitored storage for the tens of years deemed safe by the regulators leaves open the opportunity to avoid the potential consequences of a hastily executed “hail Mary.” They want a say in their and their children’s children’s future, and don’t want to hijack future deliberate scientific and ethical considerations.

In the United States, nuclear waste is submerged in spent-fuel pools, where it must remain for at least five years to reduce the extreme heat and radioactivity. Then, at many U.S. reactors it is transferred to heavily shielded, silo-like containers and stored on site. In Sweden, the waste stays in pool storage, first at the reactor and then at a central location.

The young speakers also had strong views regarding the tone of the nuclear industry’s public statements. People need to be informed without propaganda, they said, and communicating should be transparent and not be aimed to “convince.” They don’t buy the industry’s mantra that if people just knew how safe nuclear power was, they would support it. Also discussed: Is it appropriate or immoral for a community to receive money in exchange for hosting a nuclear waste repository, which, on its own, also would create jobs and other economic development? It was the judgment of young speakers that accepting financial incentives is objectionable and immoral. In Sweden, the concept of a repository creating economic benefits has given way to “added value agreements” for the host community’s long-term well-being. This was interesting to me, after hearing people say in Nevada and elsewhere, “Hey, there could be lots of money here if we volunteer for a dump.”

In a session on solar energy, people were shocked to hear of the battles we are having in Nevada to get fair billing and acceptance by NV Energy and the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada. Conference attendees agreed that the world needed to embrace renewable energy of all kinds, as widely and as soon as possible. Many found it inconceivable that the U.S. would not move as quickly as possible toward reducing carbon emissions and considered it crazy that a place as sunny as Southern Nevada was not covered with solar panels. We drove into Germany several times during the trip and there were solar panels on roofs everywhere — so many, in fact, that the country’s electrical grid is being modernized to better accommodate local electricity generators, called distributed generation.

We returned to Las Vegas just in time for a heat wave. Newscasts said NV Energy was concerned about stress on the grid during peak air-conditioning times. If rooftop solar had continued to grow at the rate it was last summer, would we be worried about power for air conditioning during this hot spell? Why in the world are we now having to get the Legislature to overturn the PUCN decision that put the residential rooftop solar installers out of business and stopped homeowners from installing systems on their homes? I find our situation here hard to connect to “Ethics in Decisions on Energy.” As one speaker at the conference noted, we need to move beyond the paradigm of “energy as a commodity” to one of “energy citizenship.”

Judy Treichel is executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force and an advocate of solar energy.