Lessons from Yucca Mountain:
Standards, Regulations and Performance Assessments

Rodney C. Ewing
Frank Stanton Chair of International Security
Professor of Earth Sciences
Stanford University

Monday April 14, 2014

Standards and regulations for the management, transportation and disposal of radioactive materials have been key to the development of strategies for the handling and disposing of radioactive materials at the “back-end” of the nuclear fuel cycle.  This presentation summarizes previous U.S. experience in developing a standard and regulations for the geologic disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The main purpose of a standard and its implementing regulations should be to protect human health and the environment, but the structure of the standard and regulations, as well as the standard-of-proof for compliance, should not extend beyond what is scientifically possible and reasonable.  The demonstration of compliance must not only be compelling, but it must also be able to sustain scientific and public scrutiny. We can benefit from the sobering reality of how difficult it is to project the future behavior of a geologic repository over extended spatial and temporal scales that stretch over tens of kilometers and out to a million years.

Rod Ewing is the Frank Stanton Professor of International Security in the Center for International Security and Cooperation and a Professor in the Geological and Environmental Sciences Department at Stanford University. He is also the Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan, where he also held faculty appointments in Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences and Materials Science & Engineering. He is Emeritus Regents' Professor at the University of New Mexico where he was a member of the faculty of Earth and Planetary Sciences. He is the author or co-author of over 650 research publications and the editor or co-editor of 18 monographs, proceedings volumes or special issues of journals. He has been granted a patent for the development of a highly durable material for the immobilization of excess weapons plutonium.  He is a founding Editor of the magazine, Elements, which is now supported by 17 earth science societies.
Ewing has received the Hawley Medal of the Mineralogical Association of Canada in 1997 and 2002, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, the Dana Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2006, the Lomonosov Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2006, and a Honorary Doctorate from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 2007.  He serves on the Board of Directors of the Geochemical Society, the Board of Governors of the Gemological Institute of America and the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In 2012, he was appointed by President Obama to serve as the Chair of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which is responsible for ongoing and integrated technical review of DOE activities related to transporting, packaging, storing and disposing of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.