After a business group raised the idea last month, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said Tuesday the possibility of storing nuclear waste in Mississippi is worth exploring.
At a lunch for business leaders in Ridgeland, Miss., the prominent Republican said the state should consider the idea. He said the risk entailed in waste storage is “virtually zero,” noting that Entergy's Grand Gulf plant has safely stored spent fuel on site for decades, the Jackson Clarion Ledger reported. Nonetheless he added that doing so would require identification of an appropriate geologic site and development of needed infrastructure, none of which would be available any time soon.
Barbour was specifically speaking to an idea raised by the Mississippi Energy Institute to create an interim consolidated storage site, which could also lead to spent fuel reprocessing and the potential for long-term waste storage in the state's salt domes. A white paper by the group estimated an interim site could attract $500 million in investment and about 100 jobs. Any proposal to accept out-of-state waste, though, is likely to generate significant opposition from other Mississippi politicians, as well as environmental groups that helped scuttle a similar proposal in the 1980s.
State support would be crucial to a Mississippi site's selection for interim spent fuel storage. The Department of Energy is pursuing alternatives to the stalled Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada using the “consent-based” process envisioned by the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.