POWER November 2011 - 76

NUCLEAR WASTE POLICY
The U.S. Spent Nuclear Fuel Policy,
Part 2: Playing Hardball
Ongoing investigations into cancellation of the Yucca Mountain project have revealed
an astonishing number of irregularities by agencies responsible for
the project. Those investigations have exposed a broken system that failed
to properly manage the project and that surrendered to political pressure.
Worse still, the draft report of President Obama's Blue Ribbon Commission
on America's Nuclear Future gave the industry little reason to hope that
there would ever be a long-term nuclear waste fuel repository.
By Dr. Robert Peltier, PE and James M. Hylko
E
ighteen months ago, we examined the history
and status of the U.S. spent nuclear
fuel policy. In that report we observed that
the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) legal
deadlines required by the Nuclear Waste Policy
Act (NWPA) and Amendments (NWPAA) for
establishing a permanent repository for spent
nuclear fuel (SNF) have come and gone. (See
" The U.S. Spent Nuclear Fuel Policy: Road to
Nowhere, " May 2010, in our online archives
at www.powermag.com.) After cancelling the
Yucca Mountain repository project, President
Barack Obama appointed another commission
to " conduct a comprehensive review and to
make recommendations about policies for managing
the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle and
for a new plan " within two years.
A Review of Earlier Conclusions
We presented four important conclusions in
our earlier report. They were that:
■ The monetary damages to date, and the
future federal liability costs for failing to
construct a repository, are enormous and
continue to grow each year.
■ Nuclear utilities continue to pay a mil per
kilowatt-hour produced for the Yucca
Mountain facility that was cancelled.
■ On-site storage will become the new normal
because a Yucca Mountain replacement
is politically impossible.
■ The new Blue Ribbon Commission (BRC)
will have no more success finding a new
site than its predecessor commissions.
Let's quickly walk through the rationale
we used when coming to those conclusions.
The NWPAA, signed by President H.W.
Bush on December 22, 1987, codified the Yucca
Mountain site as the nation's permanent repository
for SNF and other high-level nuclear wastes.
That location decision was made when both
houses of Congress overrode the Nevada gover76
nor's
veto, as allowed by law. In our opinion, this
decision has so poisoned any future, necessarily
public site selection process that no governor
would dare vote for a repository site within his
or her state-unless the benefits to the state were
enormous. Nor will Congress ever again muster
enough votes to override a governor's veto, given
the polarizing nature of the project.
We also observed that nuclear utilities had
paid $31 billion into the Nuclear Waste Fund
(NWF) from 1983 through the end of FY2009,
less the $7.3 billion that was spent on developing
Yucca Mountain, leaving a $23.6 billion
(virtual) balance (updated from our previous
article). That money went into the general fund
and has been spent-it's not in a " lock box. "
This financial data was taken from a report
released by the Congressional Budget Office
(CBO) titled " The Federal Government's Responsibilities
and Liabilities Under the Nuclear
Waste Policy Act " that was released on July 27,
2010, a few months after our earlier report.
A strong case can also be made that the money
collected to date will have to be refunded to
the nuclear payors should the DOE abandon the
search for a long-term storage facility. Today,
about $2 billion is added to the NWF each year,
so the fund balance today, on paper, is pushing
$28 billion. From a strictly economic point of
view, the formation of the BRC effectively delayed
that day of reckoning until at least early in
2012, when the committee's final report is due.
In the meantime, individual utilities are suing
the federal government at a record pace for
failing its legal duty to provide the storage facility
on time. As of June 2010, electric utilities
had filed 72 lawsuits " seeking compensation for
costs they incurred because the federal government
could not begin to accept nuclear waste for
disposal in 1998, " according to the CBO report.
As of that same date, 11 of the lawsuits had been
settled for about $725 million, 10 lawsuits had
been dismissed, and one payment of $35 million
was made to Tennessee Valley Authority,
www.powermag.com
1. Reactor recharging. Tennessee Valley
Authority (TVA) workers carry out refueling
operations on the Browns Ferry Unit 2 reactor.
Courtesy: TVA
another government entity. Of the 50 pending
cases, 20 had been decided by June 2010 but
had pending post-trial motions.
The CBO observed that, " Because judicial
claims for damages are made retrospectively,
many more cases can be expected in the coming
decades as utilities seek to recover their ongoing
costs for storing nuclear waste long after they
expected it to be removed and sent to a permanent
disposal site. " The CBO also calculated the
" taxpayers' liabilities to electric utilities " will
total about $13 billion if a permanent facility is
opened by 2021, an unlikely scenario. The CBO
also observed that " it is not clear how the Administration's
decision to terminate the Yucca
Mountain repository will affect the federal government's
liabilities to electric utilities. If DOE
is found at some point to have fully breached its
contractual commitments, the federal government's
liabilities could increase considerably. "
Note that should Congress and the president
decide to change the NWPA to permit a
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POWER November 2011

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