DOE’s Marla Morales talks with ANS’s Craig Piercy

A recent American Nuclear Society webinar featured an extended one-on-one conversation between ANS CEO Craig Piercy and Marla Morales, the acting deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and high-level waste disposition at the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy. The two discussed the future of the fuel cycle in the United States, especially as it relates to the Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses program launched by the DOE earlier this year.

Some background: Piercy kicked off the discussion by asking Morales to walk him through her professional background. Morales explained that she is a geologist by training, having earned an undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University and a master's degree from the University of Texas-San Antonio. She then had a brief stint in the oil and gas industry doing site characterization work before transitioning to the Southwest Research Institute, where she worked on site characterization for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project. She then moved to environmental project management and public outreach at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before finally transitioning to the DOE. At the DOE, before her current role, she worked on the Collaboration-Based (previously called Consent-Based) Siting Program.

Of her unique background across research, regulation, and implementation, Morales noted that "those different avenues in different places gave me a larger view of what it really means to be part of the nuclear landscape."

Talking campuses: Switching focus to the Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses program, Piercy pointed out that the DOE received responses to its original request for information from more than half of U.S. states, some of which have actively indicated that they're willing to consider waste disposal. "That's a huge sea change in thinking," he said, compared with the long-standing opposition states have had to hosting waste. He then asked the obvious question: What has accounted for this change?

Morales first pointed out that we are currently in a nuclear renaissance, a time of new nuclear momentum that builds on years of previous efforts. That momentum is also being built on bipartisan support for new energy build-out and a generational shift in how the public views nuclear.

Second, she said the lifecycle campus program was built to clear the historic stumbling block of waste disposition, in part by bringing together the front and back ends of the fuel cycle under one program. Of the 26 states that responded to the original RFI, 12 states "said a version of yes," she said, opening the door to more conversations about waste disposal.

Winnowing down: From those 12 states, the DOE has signed memorandums of understanding with five (Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Utah) to continue further conversation. Morales clarified that these MOUs are not commitments to establish any programs; they are only commitments to explore working with the DOE more. She also said that the DOE is currently investigating how many campuses they will ultimately aim to have, adding that there will likely be further down-selection from the current five.

Piercy then asked a question likely on the mind of many states currently talking with the DOE: "If you are going to be a state who is successful in navigating this process, do you have to be willing to accept some amount of used fuel from our existing stockpile of once-through light water reactor fuel?" He also asked if advanced reactor companies reprocessing their fuel would be an acceptable alternative.

Morales responded by explaining that, in fact, all five of the currently involved states have expressed interest in reprocessing, calling it one of the more attractive parts of the program as a whole. "If you think about the Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses as a whole, everything in the front end is a little bit like the appetizers. You can pick and choose what you want, but the main course always had to be waste disposal, waste disposition," she said. Public-private, state-level partnerships with advanced reactor companies frequently involve reprocessing, and states generally look at that reprocessing as an attractive driver for economic opportunities.

"If you couple reprocessing with disposal, you're changing the waste forms, you're pulling out some of the poisons and toxins, and so now disposal looks different. That's part of this conversation. When disposal is no longer Yucca Mountain, when it's no longer 40 miles of subsurface tunnels, it really does allow states to envision what it could look like," she said.

Go deeper: In their full conversation, Piercy and Morales go much deeper on the future of Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses and the back end of the fuel cycle. The conversation is available for viewing on the ANS YouTube channel.