U.S. panel proposes interim nuclear waste sites

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States should develop temporary storage facilities to hold the waste produced by the country's nuclear reactors until a long-term plan is developed, a federal panel proposed on Friday.

The commission, set up by the Obama administration after it suspended the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear dump, said the interim sites would provide flexibility as the government figures out how to manage its radioactive waste.

The administration canceled the Yucca project after years of intense opposition from Nevada residents, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Tasked with recommending a national strategy for disposing of nuclear waste, the panel stressed in its draft proposal that such facilities would not be the ultimate solution to the waste problem.

"This will not become the permanent disposal site for nuclear waste," said Phil Sharp, panel member and president of environmental policy think tank Resources for the Future.

PERMANENT SITE STILL NEEDED

Under the proposal, the United States would develop one or more temporary facilities that could safely store nuclear waste for as long as 100 years.

The facilities could start on a relatively small scale by holding only fuel from nine decommissioned reactor sites, said panel member Richard Meserve, a former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Eventually the capacity of the storage facility would have to grow to hold more waste as aging plants shut down, he said.

U.S. nuclear waste is currently stored on-site at the nation's 104 reactors, but safety concerns have been raised about keeping it strewn throughout the country for decades with no permanent solution in sight.

Worries about nuclear waste storage have been heightened by Japan's nuclear crisis, in which the Japanese have struggled to keep damaged spent fuel pools from overheating.

The U.S. government would need to remain committed to finding a deep geologic site that could permanently store the waste, the panel said.

An interim site "will only work if it's combined with ... a process for getting an ultimate disposal site", said commissioner John Rowe, chief executive of Exelon Corp.

The commission will weigh whether to adopt the recommendations for its draft report due by the end of July.

(Editing by Dale Hudson and Sofina Mirza-Reid)