Abstract
New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant took three decades, several lawsuits, myriad battles with the Department of Energy, and more than a few political twists and turns before becoming the first and only operational geologic radioactive waste repository in the world. The story of how Carlsbad, New Mexico, became the center of a national drama is an object lesson in how the United States and countries around the world can improve on this lengthy, contentious, and incredibly vital repository approval process. As more and more nations build nuclear programs and accumulate radioactive waste, there is no time to lose in initiating plans for safe disposal sites that can last—essentially—forever.
Keywords
In the predawn hours of March 26, 1999, after 27 years of scientific study, local lobbying, political pressures, lawsuits by two New Mexico attorneys general, and several acts of Congress, the first shipment of radioactive waste arrived at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico. This shipment, arriving from the Los Alamos National Laboratory—where the atomic age first dawned—marked the opening of the world’s first, and so far only, operating geologic tomb for radioactive waste.
How and why was WIPP approved while other radioactive waste disposal sites—such as the proposed high-level waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada—have languished amid local not-in-my-backyard concerns and political equivocation? Tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel sit idly at reactor sites in the United States with hundreds of thousands more tons undisposed of worldwide. As the still-unfolding disaster at Fukushima and the failure of the reactors’ spent-fuel pools has shown us, spent fuel is not benign. Undisposed, it remains susceptible to accident or misuse by terrorists.
Although the quarter-century process that led to WIPP’s opening was far from perfect, as President Harry S. Truman said in 1947, “[O]ne of the chief virtues of a democracy… is that its defects are always visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected” (Truman, 1947). In that spirit, the United States has learned several important lessons from the WIPP process in Carlsbad—lessons that can help inform and improve processes currently underway for other proposed radioactive waste disposal sites around the world. Obviously, each site will have its own geologic and political characteristics, but many WIPP lessons are universal.
The events in Carlsbad and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Washington, DC—as WIPP wound its way from local economic-development project to operational repository—form the best existing case study for the elements of an ultimately successful approval process. And this case study could not be timelier: The United States, South Korea, Japan, China, Canada, and countries throughout Europe are grappling with the radioactive waste disposal problem—and grappling with what public processes to use to solve it. WIPP is the key.
What is WIPP?
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is a deep geologic radioactive waste repository located in the Chihuahuan Desert in salt beds 2,150 feet beneath the surface and 26 miles southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico. WIPP is operated by Washington TRU Solutions through a contract with the US Department of Energy and under restrictive permits issued by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the New Mexico Environment Department. The federal government spent approximately $2 billion to build WIPP, which has an annual operating budget of more than $200 million.
Under its state and federal permits as well as the 1992 US Land Withdrawal Act, radioactive waste disposal at WIPP is limited to the narrow category of defense-related transuranic waste, which is defined as waste containing man-made radioactive elements that have atomic numbers higher than uranium. This definition excludes low-level and high-level wastes from disposal at WIPP. In other words, the defense-related provision limits WIPP: The plant can only accept waste created by US nuclear weapon development; it is prohibited from accepting waste from the commercial nuclear power industry. The majority of the waste destined for WIPP consists of clothing, tools, and debris contaminated with plutonium as a result of nuclear weapon production during the Cold War.
Physically, WIPP is made up of a series of corridors and rooms mined out of the Salado Formation. This salt formation was created 250 million years ago as evaporation of the ancient Permian sea created a 2,000-foot-thick salt bed. Because of plutonium’s high toxicity (extremely minute amounts have been shown to cause lung cancer if inhaled) and long endurance in the natural environment (the radioactive half-life of plutonium 239—plutonium’s most common isotope—is 24,000 years), the EPA was asked to certify that WIPP can isolate this waste for a period of at least 10,000 years. WIPP’s rooms are designed to accomplish this crucial feat by using the natural plasticity of salt under pressure, which will collapse in on itself over time, compacting and encapsulating the waste. Once WIPP reaches its capacity, it is estimated that these tunnels and rooms will collapse and “heal themselves” within a century (Cravens, 2007: 350). Meanwhile, the WIPP rooms continue to be filled with drums of transuranic waste shipped via truck from sites across the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons complex.
Why Carlsbad?
From its inception, the town of Carlsbad and surrounding Eddy County have been focused on creating a thriving economy in what can be a challenging desert setting. Rancher Charles Bishop Eddy founded Carlsbad in the late nineteenth century on the banks of the Pecos River in southeastern New Mexico. Noting the popularity at the time of soaking in mineral waters, residents voted in 1899 to name the town “Carlsbad” after the popular spa resort in Czechoslovakia in hopes that it would draw tourists and settlers (McCutcheon, 2002). Alas, the dusty American Carlsbad never lived up to its spa-town namesake. In fact, the county lost more than one-third of its 12,000 souls between the 1910 and 1920 census (US Census, 1910, 1920).
But, in 1925, potash deposits were discovered. The United States Potash Company opened the first mine in the area in 1930, and, by the end of World War II, the region accounted for 85 percent of the national production of potassium carbonate. The mines led to a population boom, and, by 1960, Carlsbad’s population exceeded 25,000. However, large deposits of potash were also soon discovered in Canada—driving down the price of potash from $50 a ton to $11. And, in 1967, US Potash announced it would close the mine. By 1970, the population of Carlsbad had shrunk to 21,297 (McCutcheon, 2002).
Meanwhile, bedded salt was beginning to attract scientific attention as a possible place to dispose of fast-accumulating nuclear waste. In 1957, the National Academy of Science concluded in a report that “the most promising method” of disposing of radioactive waste is in underground salt deposits (National Academy of Sciences, 1957: 4). And, in the mid-1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began studying a former salt mine near Lyons, Kansas, as a potential location for a repository. These efforts were abandoned in 1971 after Kansas officials raised technical concerns. Meanwhile, upon hearing this news—and considering the economic hardship the mine closure had caused Carlsbad—State Senator Joe Gant Jr reportedly called local Congressman Harold Runnels and asked, “Why not Carlsbad?” (Taylor, 2007: 122). And so, efforts were launched to locate a repository in the salt deposits outside Carlsbad.
WIPP has always enjoyed strong local support in a region hungry for jobs. And the area’s residents—all too familiar with the boom-and-bust economic cycles of the local potash and oil-and-gas industries—were already accustomed to the inherent dangers of mining and energy extraction. Compared with other communities, this may have given local residents a higher tolerance for the risks associated with nuclear waste disposal.
The Carlsbad area was also generally knowledgeable about the Energy Department and its precursor, the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1961, as a part of the federal government’s “Plowshares” program, a 5-kiloton atomic bomb was detonated in a local salt bed, “melting more than 2,000 tons of salt, creating a cavity larger than the base of the US Capitol dome and taller than an eight story building” (McCutcheon, 2002: 24). “Project Gnome,” as the experiment was called, had been designed to explore the peaceful use of atomic weapons in creating underground storage caverns. It succeeded in creating a large cavity, but the space was too radioactive to be of use and the project was deemed a failure. Failure or no, this experiment gave the local population an idea of the economic possibilities that atomic energy could bring to the area. If the town couldn’t be a spa resort or mineral metropolis, maybe it could hitch its economic wagon to this new nuclear industry, which had already turned tiny Los Alamos, New Mexico, into the Manhattan Project’s “Secret City.”
The local Carlsbad Current-Argus’s headline in 1959 during the run up to Project Gnome could easily apply 40 years later to WIPP: “Atom Bomb May Be Boon for Carlsbad: Could Bring About Further Industrial Expansion in Eddy” (McCutcheon, 2002: 24).
The 30-year odyssey: A history of WIPP’s approval process
Despite unwavering support in Carlsbad, WIPP’s track record in the state capital would be decidedly more mixed. New Mexico is one of the nation’s most diverse states: both ethnically (with the highest percentage of people of Hispanic heritage—45 percent—and the third-highest percentage of Native Americans) and politically (New Mexico runs the gamut from affluent and liberal Santa Fe to the socially and politically conservative counties of “Little Texas” in the southeast). This often led statewide political leaders to take cautious and sometimes confusing stances on WIPP. Over the three decades it took to open the project, Attorney General Jeff Bingaman sued the federal government in 1981 over WIPP’s development and then ended up being the US senator who passed its enabling legislation in 1992. WIPP’s most vocal critic in the House of Representatives was Bill Richardson, who ended up as the US secretary of energy who opened the facility. As the legendary, three-term New Mexico Governor Bruce King said of the project, “Some of my friends support it, and some oppose it, and I’m for my friends” (McCutcheon, 2002: 30).
Further complicating the approval process was the Energy Department’s repeated inability to maintain promises made to state officials. This began in 1977, when the department abruptly announced that in addition to waste from the weapons program, it was also seriously considering the WIPP site as the location for a civilian high-level waste repository. Even Senator Pete Domenici, then early in his career but already established as a supporter of all things nuclear, stated that talk of expanding WIPP to also include civilian waste was “inappropriate and premature” (McCutcheon, 2002: 30).
Realizing that trying to expand WIPP’s mission could end up killing the project altogether, Energy Secretary James Schlesinger met with New Mexico’s congressional delegation in February 1978 and verbally promised the state “veto power” over the WIPP project. Unfortunately, in the months to follow, the Energy Department would back off from this position, replacing its promise of “veto power” with a more vague promise of state “concurrence.” As journalist Chuck McCutcheon noted, “Because of its failure to articulate a consistent vision and state oversight role for WIPP, the department went from dealing with a once cooperative state government to a hostile one” (2002: 65).
This early conflict had far-reaching consequences. In 1979, Congress acted to settle the issue by passing legislation authorizing WIPP “to demonstrate the safe disposal of radioactive waste resulting from the defense activities and programs of the United States” (Public Law 96-164, Section 213). This was an attempt to clearly and narrowly define the mission of the repository as exclusively for the disposal of defense-related waste. The law also required the Energy Department to “seek to enter into a written agreement” with New Mexico on WIPP (Hancock, 2010: 3).
Just the same, in May 1981, New Mexico Attorney General Bingaman filed suit in federal district court to block construction of the initial phase of WIPP. A series of agreements in the 1980s settled the lawsuit and required the Energy Department to “consult and cooperate” with the state. The settlement also granted the state the right to independently monitor WIPP, allowed for public comment on policy proposals for the facility, and committed the Energy Department to funding upgrades to state highways that would see increased truck traffic because of WIPP (Hancock, 2010). But the Energy Department would continually find ways to try to circumvent these agreements.
The Energy Department’s attempted shortcuts were largely prompted by Idaho Governor Cecil Andrus’ announcement in October 1988 that he would not allow waste shipments from the Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site near Denver to be sent to the Idaho National Lab. Andrus was disappointed that the Energy Department was making little apparent progress toward opening WIPP despite promises to Idaho that radioactive waste would soon be leaving the state. Andrus backed up his statement by deploying Idaho State Troopers to the border to block rail shipments—“for safety purposes and because I didn’t trust the Department of Energy”—making national news in the process (McCutcheon, 2002: 101).
Meanwhile, environmental groups were having great success at galvanizing opposition to WIPP. Much of the local opposition was centered in Santa Fe; the Energy Department planned to use the town’s busy St Francis Drive for nuclear waste shipments originating from Los Alamos National Laboratory. The department assured residents that “Santa Fe would see relatively few WIPP shipments, and those that would pass through town were expected to employ an as yet un-built highway bypass.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, “such arguments failed to take into account the fact that the public perceived radioactive materials as posing especially unique threats” (McCutcheon, 2002: 114).
Despite the public opposition to WIPP, pressure from Idaho Governor Andrus finally succeeded in getting the federal government’s attention. In 1990, Energy Secretary James Watkins announced that WIPP would open for a “test phase” and asked the Department of the Interior to administratively transfer the WIPP site to the Energy Department, bypassing congressional action. On October 3, 1991, Watkins notified Governor King that WIPP was ready to open within seven days—without any effort to garner the state’s approval (Hancock, 2010).
Less than a week later, New Mexico Attorney General Tom Udall filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block WIPP’s opening. Environmental advocacy groups, Texas Attorney General Dan Morales, and New Mexico Congressman Bill Richardson joined the lawsuit. In December, US District Judge John Garrett Penn granted a preliminary injunction to prohibit storing waste at WIPP.
As it had a decade earlier, Congress stepped in to break the impasse, passing the WIPP Land Withdrawal Act. Sponsored by now-Senator Bingaman, the 1992 law set a number of regulatory limits on what kinds of waste could be stored at WIPP, and how that waste was to be transported. It also authorized the federal government to pay New Mexico $20 million a year for 14 years. But perhaps the most important part of the new law granted the EPA authority to set standards for the management and disposal of waste at WIPP, addressing concerns that the Energy Department could not be trusted to “self-regulate.”
In October 1993, the Energy Department—now under EPA oversight—announced an end to efforts to proceed with a WIPP “test phase.” In 1995, Idaho and the Energy Department announced an agreement that required waste shipments from Idaho to begin by April 1999, and for 65,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste to be shipped to WIPP or another disposal site by no later than the end of 2018.
WIPP won EPA approval in May 1998 (Federal Register, 1998). This success can largely be credited to Clinton administration Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary and her Deputy Chief of Staff and Chief Environmental Counsel Dan Reicher, who was very aware of the project’s checkered history. He’d been a Natural Resource Defense Council attorney on the 1991 litigation that stopped WIPP’s “test phase,” and he understood that independent verification of the project’s safety would be key to garnering state and public approval. “My view when it comes to controversial facilities like this is, take your time,” Reicher said. “We’re talking thousands and thousands of years. Take your time with the process, with the science, with analysis. Part of what we added to this was, we did take more time, because there were all sorts of political pressures from various states, but there really was no rush” (McCutcheon, 2002: 171).
Polling data supports this belief. Only 26 percent of New Mexicans supported WIPP in 1980, but by 1998 approval had grown to 49 percent, with 46 percent in opposition (McCutcheon, 2002). As Rip Anderson, who had long worked on the WIPP project as a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, noted, “Before WIPP opened, people needed to be assured and educated that every aspect was completely safe” (Cravens, 2007: 329).
Part of that assurance and education came from a group organized in 1978. Given the early controversy over WIPP’s purpose, a lack of scientific clarity about what the project would entail, and a question as to how the facility would be deemed safe enough to handle its mission, the Energy Department formed the Environmental Evaluation Group (EEG). The EEG—a state and federally funded, quasi-independent scientific evaluation group—would prove valuable as the project moved forward, its third-party scientists providing the public with a degree of trustworthy expertise that the Energy Department, because of its vested interest in the project, could not.
The state made a last-ditch legal effort to block WIPP’s opening in 1999. But the federal courts sided with the Energy Department and the EPA. The ruling removed the final roadblock for WIPP, allowing Energy Secretary Bill Richardson—who had successfully fought for independent EPA environmental oversight of the project as a congressman—to send the first shipment of waste to the repository from Los Alamos on March 25, 1999. “As an issue, WIPP faded after the EPA [certification], and I am convinced it’s not a very important political issue or environmental issue in New Mexico,” Richardson said (McCutcheon, 2002: 137). The fact that Richardson would later be elected governor of New Mexico by the largest margin in the state’s history supports this political calculus.
As of July 2011, WIPP had received 9,776 shipments and more than 76,000 cubic meters of waste (Washington TRU Solutions LLC, 2011). The lion’s share of waste shipments to WIPP have come from the Idaho National Laboratory, the Rocky Flats Site, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Lessons learned and suggestions for other sites
Had the Energy Department not abandoned its on-again/off-again plans to dispose of high-level waste (as opposed to solely defense-related, transuranic waste) in WIPP, the facility would likely not be the success it is today. Nevertheless, the WIPP permitting process still holds myriad lessons that could inform and improve efforts to create spent fuel repositories in Canada, Sweden, Finland, France, South Korea, Japan, China, and, yes, the United States. The following recommendations are based to a large degree on democratic processes, and therefore many may be more applicable to Western-style democracies than to China.
Local support is essential
“From the start, support in Carlsbad that was rooted in economic anxiety gave an essential impetus to the project” (McCutcheon, 2002: 194). Local support for WIPP helped push the project along at several key junctures when controversies in Santa Fe or Washington threatened to derail it. According to the US Census Bureau, New Mexico has the nation’s fifth highest rate of people living in poverty. New Mexico’s economy is also highly reliant on federal government spending, especially nuclear weapon development, ranking number one in the nation for federal spending per federal tax dollar (The Tax Foundation, 2007). Despite the high rate of poverty overall, this federal spending creates pockets of prosperity, especially in Los Alamos County (ranked number one in New Mexico and 18th in the nation for per capita income) and, to a lesser extent, in Carlsbad’s Eddy County (New Mexico’s ninth highest per capita income since WIPP was established). Therefore, WIPP’s local boosters had good reason to see the project as an economic bonanza for the area. In an area with relatively disadvantaged and unstable economic prospects, one of the best and most proven methods of economic development was government spending. One of the key reasons for the failure to create a waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain is the lack of this local support. As former EEG member Lokesh Chaturvedi put it: “The primary lesson from the cancellation of the Yucca Mountain project is that public support for complicated large projects is paramount” (Chaturvedi, 2010: 2).
Applicants must be transparent and trustworthy
Time and again in its efforts to open WIPP, the Energy Department put expediency ahead of honest, transparent dealings with state officials. This fostered an air of distrust that left the state and its residents concerned about whether the promises would be kept. This credibility gap led directly to state lawsuits and adversarial relationships that likely added years to the approval process.
Don’t underestimate the time required
South Korea, Japan, and to a lesser extent China all appear to be proceeding with plans to reprocess spent nuclear fuel—rather than dispose of it—in the mistaken belief that it will buy them time to address the waste problem at a later date. Unfortunately, this shortsightedness is robbing them of the time needed to fully address the complex and time-consuming issue of creating a nuclear waste repository site. Reprocessing or no, one thing is certain: Each country will ultimately need to find a way to dispose of its waste. As Chaturvedi stated to the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future on July 7, 2010, “Geological repository or repositories will be needed to dispose spent nuclear fuel and defense high-level waste even if large-scale reprocessing (plutonium producing or ‘proliferation resistant’) is undertaken, because the ‘closed fuel cycle’ remains a mirage” (Chaturvedi, 2010: 2).
South Korea has recently halted its public-consensus process in order to seek “expert opinion” first (Kang, 2010). Both are needed, but both could easily and productively proceed on parallel tracks. Given that the more limited WIPP facility took the better part of three decades to go from planning to approval, South Korea may want to act more efficiently. China, promisingly, appears to be taking a more well-thought-out approach, with a geologic repository slated to be operational by 2050 (Yun, 2010). But even this timeline may prove to be too aggressive if the politically and radioactively “hotter” issue of high-level waste is under consideration.
Forever is a long time. Don’t skimp on the incentives
First in 1989 and then again in 1990, 1991, and 1994, local opposition forced the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute to scrap plans for a series of proposed repositories (Park et al., 2010). These controversies led the South Korean government in 2005 to agree to a series of economic incentives and regulatory limits in exchange for local agreement on a low-level waste site in Gyeongju in the southeastern part of the country. Economic incentives and regulation may in fact be necessary concessions for any repository approval process. But the high cost of the facility’s local economic incentives (almost $500 million at capacity) and construction costs ($1.5 billion) have the country’s leaders worried about the potential costs for a disposal site for more highly radioactive material, and they have sought “other alternatives” (Park et al., 2010: 3). If the WIPP experience is any guide, these “other alternatives” will only end up costing taxpayers more money and further draw out a long and involved process.
The half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years; communities that host nuclear waste repositories will have to live with them essentially forever. The level of economic incentives offered by repository planners should therefore be commensurate with the extremely long duration of the commitment. South Korea appears to be short-changing radioactive waste host communities by not offering any infrastructure investments on top of other incentives. Not surprisingly, this has led to difficulties in getting local support for increased storage. However, Jungmin Kang has found that local populations could support additional storage “if their safety is assured and the local sites are properly compensated financially” (Kang, 2010: 20). As McCutcheon wrote of the WIPP experience: “Money, training and other forms of compensation are essential. The [Energy Department] did little early on to ensure New Mexico would receive such benefits and paid a political price” (McCutcheon, 2002: 195).
Public expectations have changed. Applicants must keep up
As geologist and Blue Ribbon Commission member Allison MacFarlane recently noted in a public presentation, the days of nuclear siting authorities following the “decide, announce, defend” tack are over (MacFarlane, 2010). Although the public during World War II and the Cold War may have been willing to accept “national security” as an unquestionable reason for the government to proceed with large-scale projects, citizens now expect multiple opportunities to review, question, and comment.
As New Mexico Environment Secretary Ron Curry noted in his testimony to the Blue Ribbon Commission last year, “These [public participation] processes give local communities a voice in decisions that can otherwise feel imposed on them by Washington” (Curry, 2010). Unfortunately, the United States did not heed this lesson at Yucca Mountain.
Exclude NGOs at your own peril
Transparent public processes also give ample opportunities for environmental groups and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to participate and often improve governmental proposals. Don Hancock of the Southwest Research and Information Center has been involved with opposition and criticism of the WIPP project since the 1970s. In response to repeated questioning from Hancock about the scientific validity the WIPP project, the Department of Energy often ignored him or tried to limit his participation. This only prompted more questioning from Hancock and promulgated an air of scientific uncertainty around WIPP. Since then, state regulators in particular have welcomed Hancock into permitting decisions at early points in the process. While this does not mean that there will be consensus, it does create a less adversarial (and often shorter) process. As Curry has said, “While many members of the public may never agree to support nuclear waste disposal, a public and transparent process allows for a valuable exchange of information that fosters a more trusting relationship among the various interests” (Curry, 2010).
Independent oversight and authority provide reassurance
In creating and funding the Environmental Evaluation Group, the Energy Department smartly realized the limitations of its own scientific trustworthiness with the public and sought to set up a third party to settle disputes. Complicated approval processes with incredibly long time horizons (10,000 years in the case of WIPP) will inevitably result in significant scientific uncertainty. Groups like the EEG help give the public a degree of comfort that any scientific conclusions reached are the best, most impartial conclusions available—and not simply the most expedient.
State veto powers and abilities for independent regulatory authority provide an additional level of comfort. Curry noted this in his Blue Ribbon Commission testimony: “Independent and outside regulatory oversight and enforcement is vital to ameliorating the public’s justifiable and entirely reasonable concern that the federal government can’t be trusted with this task” (Curry, 2010). Curry’s testimony is colored by the fact that the state’s battles have continued in recent years as the Energy Department has unsuccessfully attempted to expand WIPP’s mission to include high-level tank sludges from the Hanford Site in Washington state and commercial waste left over from its own failed reprocessing efforts at West Valley in New York (Hancock, 2010). This further highlights the need for the local regulatory authority to go beyond one-time-only veto power and to include ongoing oversight and enforcement capabilities.
Embrace the politics
In discussing the approval process for Yucca Mountain, MacFarlane has noted, “It is as much a political process as a technical process” (2010). And journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele have observed, “With the possible exception of the income tax, no other modern-day issue is so firmly mired in Washington politics as that of nuclear waste” (McCutcheon, 2002: 5). Both statements are undoubtedly true, but the link between nuclear waste policy and politics is not necessarily a negative. If wielded effectively, this political element can give local communities another avenue for exerting control over siting and approval processes. Governor Andrus illustrated this brilliantly as he simply invented the crisis he needed to grab the Energy Department’s attention. Japanese nuclear expert Masa Takubo recognizes and encourages this power: “Members of the Diet should also be more involved in the policy process and held accountable for the decisions made concerning (waste) reprocessing” (Takubo, 2008: 89). Such a move, if implemented, could help better educate the Japanese populace about nuclear waste plans and give them the ability to more effectively influence this policy.
Breaking the “Groundhog Day” cycle
Too often, when government officials are faced with complex, controversial, multistage approval processes, they overemphasize the uniqueness of their particular situation and neglect to learn from similar efforts in other parts of the country or world. This is a mistake: The WIPP experience—and some similar efforts in Europe and Asia—show that these situations have more in common than not.
MacFarlane recently commented, “There is nothing new with nuclear waste. History keeps repeating itself, like Groundhog Day” (2010). In the 1993 film, Bill Murray is doomed to continue reliving the same day until he breaks the cycle by learning to love. While no nation will learn to love nuclear waste, all nations have a responsibility to learn from past experiences to improve the repository process and its chances for success. Applicants and regulators need to learn to love the public approval process if they ever hope to break the nuclear waste impasse. It is only by accepting this process in its entirety—getting the public and nongovernmental organizations to the table early and often, submitting to strong local regulatory authorities, and accepting politics as inevitable and possibly useful—that society can move toward solving the nuclear waste issue.