NCSU, MfN, and TCBC Partnership for Consent-Based Siting

DOE Awards $26 Million to Support Consent-Based Siting for Spent Nuclear Fuel - You can read our blog post about the award announcement here.

Consent-based siting is an approach to siting facilities that focuses on the needs and concerns of people and communities. Communities participate in the siting process by working carefully through a series of phases and steps. Each helps a community determine whether and how hosting a facility is aligned to the community’s goals. By its nature, a consent-based siting process must be flexible, adaptive, and responsive to community concerns. Thus, the phases and steps are intended to serve as a guide, not a prescriptive set of instructions.

Twelve project teams are receiving about $2 million and represent diverse organizations, a makeup that DOE hopes will enable a broad spectrum of perspectives and approaches. One of the teams includes Mothers for Nuclear in partnership with North Carolina State University and TCBC (Tribal Consent-Based Coalition, of San Luis Obispo). We specifically hope to help find the best ways to ensure that everyone who should be included in this conversation IS included.

Yucca Mountain was a failure for many reasons, but largely because the proposal assumed that communities already impacted by nuclear issues wouldn’t have further concerns with more nuclear issues. Consent was not pursued, and it turned out that the local communities and government were not on board with the idea. We must be conscious of these past failures when determining a better path for the future.

We are excited for this opportunity to help further discussions of “what about the waste!?” which is one of the first questions we often receive when engaging with communities about nuclear energy. We are at Stage 1 in terms of planning for an interim facility to host used fuel.

We also hope to talk about nuclear for climate, a just clean energy transition, and community involvement in all aspects of an energy source that can provide us all hope for the future of humanity on this planet.

Here are links to our blog posts about the workshops we’ve hosted thus far, on our “Past Activities” blog:

January 27, 2024: Raleigh, NC

June 15, 2024: Salt Lake City, UT

Aug 24, 2024: Chicago, IL blog coming soon!