Finding ways to safely store and ultimately dispose of used fuel from commercial and defense reactors as well as high-level nuclear waste from defense and other operations has been on the national policy agenda for decades and remains a matter of considerable debate. A new phase of policy review commenced when President Barack Obama announced his decision in January 2010 to withdraw the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) license application for a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which had been pending before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). At the request of the President, the Secretary of Energy subsequently convened...

This chapter sets the stage for analyzing possible organizational models for the new MDO. It looks back and asks what the major problems in nuclear waste management were in past decades and where responsibility lies for those problems. Specifically, were the problems with the enabling legislation; the implementing actions by Congress, the White House, DOE (including OCRWM); the regulating agencies (NRC and EPA); state and local governments; or others, including stakeholders and the general public? Applying lessons and experience from the past will help policymakers design a new MDO.

Critiques of the federal government’s execution of the NWPA are abundant,...

Presidents and Congress have historically turned to GOVCORPs when looking for ways to combine some of the features of private corporations with those of government agencies. But there are other ways to accomplish this blending. One way is to create a private corporation that is federally chartered (PRIVCORP), while another is to create an independent government agency (IGA).¹ Broadly speaking, these three models can be understood as falling on a continuum that ranges from purely private-sector organizations at one extreme, to traditional government agencies at the other (see Figure 3.1).

In this chapter, we develop and characterize these three organizational...

Although there could be reasons for picking one organizational model over another on the basis of their characteristics, we discovered that more analysis was required with a focus on how well each of the models relates to what is desired in terms of the new MDO’s operational performance. So, in this chapter we describe the complex and unique responsibilities of the new MDO, its performance goals, and the critical organizational attributes that will enable the MDO to achieve its goals. We then describe the concrete structural and procedural features in an organization’s design that could produce these attributes and assess...

Presidents and Congress have considerable flexibility in designing organizations seeking to balance the advantages of a government entity (longevity, political influence, and public accountability) with the advantages of a private corporation (independence and internal flexibility). Indeed, policymakers have flexibility in choosing not only among the three organizational models (IGA, GOVCORP, and PRIVCORP) but also the specific characteristics within each of the models.

Although there could be reasons for picking one organizational model over another on the basis of their characteristics, we discovered that more analysis was required with a focus on the critical attributes an organization needs to achieve its...