House may address nuclear waste funding in the fall: Official

Washington (Platts)--30Jun2005

A move to give the US Dept of Energy nuclear waste program greater access to
the more than $700-mil collected each year from nuclear utility customers is
expected to get under way in the House after Congress completes work on the
broad energy bill, a program supporter said Thursday. 

Charles Pray, co-chairman of the Yucca Mountain Task Force, said the House
Energy and Commerce Committee may begin work on so-called funding reform
legislation sometime after September. Pray made his comments after he and
other supporters of DOE's efforts to develop a repository at Yucca Mountain,
Nevada, met with committee Chairman Joe Barton (Republican-Texas) on
Wednesday. Task force members plan to take the issue up with senators in July,
Pray added. Nuclear utility customers pay one-tenth of a cent into the Nuclear
Waste Fund for every kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated sold.

The waste fund was set up in 1983 to bankroll the DOE repository project.
Congress, however, has only made a fraction of the money available to the
agency, creating budget shortfalls that the task force and other supporters of
the DOE program claim have slowed work on the repository project. Customer
contributions, plus interest, paid into the fund to date totals more than
$24-billion. 

DOE, which was to have begun accepting utility spent fuel at a federal site in
January 1998, is unlikely to have a repository ready until sometime after
2012. The department could be six to eight weeks away from having a new
repository schedule, according to Pray, who also met with DOE waste program
officials yesterday.

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