Nuke industry questions McCain’s notion of an international nuclear waste dump site

By Lisa Mascaro

Thursday, May 29, 2008 | 1 p.m.

WASHINGTON — Sen. John McCain may want to send the nation’s nuclear waste to Siberia, but that’s not something the U.S. nuclear energy industry has ever pushed.

The nuclear industry’s main lobbying arm said today it has never advocated shipping the nation’s used nuclear fuel overseas and believes it would be extremely difficult to do so.

“It is not impossible, it is just a very complex thing to do legally, from a regulatory standpoint,” said Steven P. Kraft, senior director of used fuel management at the Nuclear Energy Institute, in a talk with reporters. “It is also, geopolitically, I would, imagine very complex.”

Speaking earlier this week in Denver, McCain suggested that the nation’s planned nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain may not be needed if there was an international dump to store the waste.

The comment appeared to be a turning point for McCain, who is the only supporter of Yucca Mountain among the remaining presidential candidates. But the next day in Reno, the presumed Republican presidential nominee reiterated his support for Yucca Mountain, the nation’s planned repository 90 miles north of Las Vegas.

McCain’s critics called that a double flip-flop – he was for Yucca before he distanced himself from it before he was for it again.

Kraft imagines McCain was referring to long-discussed concepts for an international repository, a central place where developing countries with fewer nuclear power plants than the United States could safely store their spent fuel.

He noted the industry’s sole attempt to ship a small amount of commercial nuclear material from a Long Island facility to France years ago was denied by the regulators. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission couldn’t immediately comment.

“In all the decades that I have been in this job, all the discussions in the nuclear community about international repositories have been not about the U.S., not about France, not about the large nuclear power programs… but about nuclear power programs around the world where there are one or two reactors in a country,” Kraft said.

“My guess is what’s happening here,” he said about McCain, “is what he always meant was the right role of international depositories was for smaller programs in other countries that could be brought together in one location.”

McCain’s camp, though, stood by the candidate’s remarks – all of them.

McCain supports Yucca Mountain but also believes that one day nuclear waste from the United States could be disposed of overseas.

McCain sees an international repository “as something both for other countries’ spent nuclear fuel, but also for spent nuclear fuel from the United States,” said spokesman Jeff Sadosky. “Attempts to twist his words or assert something that is absolutely not true are seen as political maneuvering on the other side.”