Management of Commercially Generated Radioactive Waste - U.S. ...

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cooperative agreement with the Federal Republic of Germany for exchange of technical infor-
mation on waste disposal, and active participation in the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA).
A twelfth issue area is that of cost of waste management. Participants in the Confer-
ence on Public Policy Issues on Nuclear Waste Management showed general agreement that we
must be willing to pay for an adequate disposal system. Some fear that adequate charges
will not be assessed to provide perpetual care. Current regulations require a fee to be
paid to the government at the time of transfer of the waste to Federal custody, although the
size of this fee has not been determined.
The President's message of February 12, 1980 specified that "all cost of storage,
including cost of locating, constructing and operating permanent geologic repositories will
be recovered through fees paid by utilities and other users of the services and will ulti-
mately be borne by those who benefit from the activities generating the wastes."
A final issue area, discussed more fully below, concerns institutions for controlling
and managing nuclear waste. These concerns relate both to the short term, i.e., the period
of time up to the closure of a waste repository, and to the long term, i.e., the period fol-
lowing closure for the hundreds of years during which the potential hazards of the waste
remain. Some individuals contend that past mishaps and leaks involving military wastes are
a basis for regarding the current institutional arrangements as inadequate. Others judge
that current institutions have done an adequate job or that new arrangements will lead to
better waste handling. Further the ability of institutions to monitor disposed waste in the
long term is a key part of the issue area. Some feel that technical considerations will
make such long-term monitoring unnecessary, while others feel that the waste has to be moni-
tored for as long as 200,000 years and would be a formidable task. A more intermediate
view is that monitoring might be required for several hundred years.
In the Department of Energy's Statement of Position for the NRC "Waste Confidence"
Rulemaking (DOE/NE-0007), a proposed objective of the program was to provide reasonable
assurance that wastes will be isolated from the environment for at least 10,000 years with
no prediction of significant decrease in isolation beyond that time. Further governmental
concern for this issue is shown by the proposed EPA criterion that a waste disposal system
cannot rely on human institutions for a period of more than 100 years (42 FR 53262).
3.5.2 Institutional Issues
The following two sections briefly expand on short-term and long-term institutional
concerns. These two sections discuss institutional concerns without reference to scale of
the waste management system. Some have argued that institutional issues may potentially
become much more severe with increasing scale (LaPorte 1978).
3.5.2.1 Short-Term Concerns and Institutional Design
Technical solutions to waste management problems are not self-implementing. They
require institutions, either those existing or ones yet to be created, to make them work.