WASHINGTON -- The administration is moving quickly to make good on President Barack Obama's promise to never open the nuclear-waste dump inside Nevada's Yucca Mountain. In early May, the White House all but zeroed out funding for the controversial underground repository, instead providing $197 million to "explore alternatives" and pay for other licensing activities (see GSN, May 14).
(May. 15) -
The entrance to an unfinished nuclear waste repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain. The Obama administration is seeking to shutter the project (Maxim Kniazko/Getty Images).
The Energy Department has yet to come up with an alternative way to permanently dispose of the 63,000 tons of spent fuel rods and other radioactive trash that have piled up at the nation's 104 commercial nuclear reactors. However, Secretary Steven Chu supports legislation championed by Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, that would authorize the president to create an 11-member, bipartisan commission to examine the viability of three options: underground waste disposal somewhere other than Yucca Mountain; long-term storage at the nuclear power companies' sites or at regional storage facilities; or the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. The commission would also consider whether the federal government should offer economic incentives to entice states, Indian tribes, and local governments to host a nuclear-waste repository, an interim waste facility, or a reprocessing plant.
Senate Republicans are pushing for a more aggressive approach. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the ranking member on Energy and Natural Resources, wants to authorize the Energy Department to work with private companies to build two commercial nuclear-waste reprocessing facilities. A number of House and Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have demanded a full explanation from Chu as to why the administration is halting work on the repository.
Industry officials are taking a more measured approach to the administration's rejection of Yucca Mountain. Marvin Fertel, president and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents nuclear power companies, supports creation of a blue-ribbon panel to sort out the waste dilemma. However, the institute wants the executive branch to go ahead and set up the commission.
"We think it's going to take a long time to get energy legislation out of Congress," he said. "So we would encourage Energy Secretary Chu to move forward."
Fertel says he is convinced that such a commission would inevitably decide that the government should reprocess the nation's commercial nuclear waste, a process he refers to as "closing the fuel cycle." The industry strongly backs reprocessing, which removes plutonium and uranium from the spent fuel rods. The separated plutonium can be used to again power nuclear reactors, or, as critics stress, it can be turned into nuclear weapons.
Critics contend that reprocessing would make it easier for terrorists or other criminals to acquire weapon-grade radioactive material. And they point out that reprocessing would still leave nuclear waste that would remain dangerously radioactive for centuries.
Reprocessing also carries a huge price tag, according to Thomas Cochran, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's nuclear program. At a March congressional hearing, Cochran estimated, "The U.S. government could easily spend on the order of $150 billion over 15 years just to get to the starting line of large-scale commercialization" of nuclear-waste reprocessing. Industry officials insist that Cochran's numbers are inflated but decline to offer their own estimate.
In 2006, President Bush called for a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, which he envisioned collecting nuclear waste from developing nations for reprocessing in the industrialized world and then resale to power plants around the globe. The controversial program never got under way -- a victim of high costs.
In the United States, radioactive waste has just kept piling up -- at the rate of 2,000 metric tons per year. Over the past 20 years, the Energy Department has spent $9 billion to study and build a network of storage tunnels under Yucca Mountain, which is about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, in hopes of creating a place where nuclear leftovers could be safely stored for thousands of years. By law, the federal government was supposed to begin moving nuclear waste away from the nation's commercial reactors to the depository by 1998. That deadline came and went.
Work on Yucca Mountain has been underwritten by consumers, who continue to pay a federally mandated fee of one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour of electricity produced by the nuclear plants. The government collects about $800 million every year. According to the DOE budget, the nuclear-waste fund now contains $22 billion.
Yucca Mountain's story is a long one. In 1982, Congress passed legislation directing the Energy Department to study several sites for possible use as a deep geologic dump for disposal of high-level radioactive waste. Politicians from all the potential host states protested; Nevada's lost. In 1987, Congress directed that study proceed on Yucca Mountain alone. Nevadans refer to that legislation as the "screw Nevada bill."
Yucca Mountain was chosen to be the permanent home of the nation's nuclear waste even though critics have always contended that it is too close to a geologic fault line. What's more, storage tunnels inside the mountain have proven to be subject to water seepage, which some scientists say could eventually corrode waste containers and contaminate groundwater supplies. Anti-nuclear groups warn that transporting thousands of tons of radioactive waste to the Nevada site would be dangerous even without the ever-present threat of terrorists.
Despite those worries, Bush in June 2008 submitted an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license the Yucca Mountain facility. Obama administration officials say they are allowing the commission to continue work on that application, but only to prove that the licensing process works.
The agency has up to four years to evaluate the licensing request. However, Chairman Dale Klein cautions that several years of budget cuts have made it impossible for the commission to meet the deadline.
"We need some guidance from Congress," Klein said. "Either give us some relief from the statutory requirement, or fund us." The agency is making progress in assessing the application, Klein said. "But if we don't have full funding, it clearly will take longer than the initial time line Congress gave us."
While nuclear power plant owners wait for Washington to solve their waste problem, companies have been transferring spent rods and other radioactive trash to large concrete casks. Once filled, these containers are moved to concrete slabs. The commission is expected to soon release a report that insiders say will allow the waste to be stored in the casks for up to 120 years.
The continuing delays in hauling off the radioactive waste will mean higher costs for taxpayers. Federal courts have ruled that the government must eventually compensate utilities for keeping nuclear waste on their property. In 2008, Energy Department officials estimated that by 2020 the government will owe the utilities $11 billion, with the debt growing by $500 million a year. The courts have ruled that the government must pay those costs from the general treasury, not from the nuclear-waste fund.
"The companies have had to build new facilities" to store the waste that DOE was supposed to remove, said Jay Silberg, a lawyer with Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman who represents some of the utilities. "So we've had the cost of designing, licensing, constructing, and operating the dry-cask storage facilities," he said.
The waste is costing some utilities in other ways as well. Minnesota forced Northern States Power to invest in wind, biomass, and other renewable-energy projects as a condition of being allowed to expand its nuclear-waste storage facility. According to Silberg, courts have since ruled that the federal government is liable for that cost as well.
As Obama refocuses the federal government on some nuclear-waste solution other than a dump deep inside Yucca Mountain, the White House faces huge political and monetary hurdles that no previous administration has been able to clear.