Bill Restores Nuclear Funds

Bill Restores Nuclear Funds

May 25 - Tri-City Herald

The U.S. House passed a bill Tuesday night that would restore $200 million of cuts to the 2006 Hanford budget and also provide money for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's new campus and to preserve Hanford's historic B Reactor.

Despite an amendment co-sponsored by U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., the bill also includes money for the initial steps to consider temporary storage of spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors at a Department of Energy site, possibly Hanford. The amendment to block temporary storage and also recycling of spent nuclear fuel failed 312-110.

The Senate still must consider and approve a budget for the Department of Energy.

"It's time to rethink our approach to spent fuel," said U.S. Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, who presented the energy and water appropriations bill to the House.

The appropriations committee report on the bill called for DOE to prepare a plan for recycling fuel in 2007 and to take action in 2006 to begin accepting spent commercial fuel from nuclear utilities and placing it in centralized interim storage at one or more DOE sites.

The nation's spent commercial fuel is supposed to go to a repository being developed in Yucca Mountain, Nev., but its opening has been delayed until at least 2012. It also has too little space and either will need to be expanded or supplemented with a second repository elsewhere in the nation, the report said.

Hanford's high-level radioactive waste also is planned to be sent to Yucca Mountain.

Recycling the commercial fuel would reduce the waste that would have to be sent to Yucca Mountain by 60 percent, according to supporters of the plan.

After fuel is processed, it retains 97 percent of its energy, Hobson said. New technology and preprocessing methods can reduce some of the historical drawbacks of recycling it, producing less high-level radioactive waste and reducing weapons proliferation risks from separated plutonium, he said.

The committee report gives DOE 120 days to develop a proposal for centralized interim storage at one or more DOE sites. The report suggested the bill consider Hanford, Idaho and South Carolina sites since they already store spent fuel from nuclear weapons projects and have extensive security in place.

"(Hanford) is the last place to send nuclear waste," Inslee argued in support of his amendment. Opponents of using Hanford for interim storage want DOE to focus on cleaning up contamination already there from more than 40 years of producing plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program.

Saying that Hanford would be used for "interim" storage of the spent fuel is similar to saying the pyramids of Egypt are interim, Inslee said.

"We didn't say put anything at Hanford," Hobson countered. "We said look at it along with other sites."

The language in the committee report would not change existing law, said Jessica Gleason, spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash. DOE had authority to provide for interim storage of commercial spent fuel under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, but the provision expired in 1990.

"This isn't the first time that Hanford has been mentioned as a possible interim or permanent storage site, and it isn't likely to be the last until Yucca Mountain is operational," she said in a prepared statement.

Once Yucca Mountain is completed, she said, Hanford wastes can be shipped out of Washington and there no longer will be a threat of Hanford being targeted as a potential storage site.

Hastings has been widely credited for getting money for the Hanford budget restored in the energy and water appropriations bill. He brought Hobson, who wrote the appropriations bill, to tour Hanford a year ago, and also pulled together a bipartisan group of all 14 Oregon and Washington representatives to push for restored Hanford funding.

DOE had proposed cutting Hanford's $2.1 billion budget for fiscal year 2005 by $267 million to $290 million in fiscal year 2006, depending on which items are included as part of the budget.

Hobson restored about $200 million in the appropriations bill. The money includes an increase of $64.1 million for the $5.8 billion vitrification plant under construction to turn some of Hanford's worst waste into a stable glass for disposal at Yucca Mountain.

It also restores about $67 million of the $89.4 million reduction in spending on work to maintain and empty Hanford's underground tanks that hold 53 million gallons of radioactive waste.

Other funding added by the bill includes $20 million for cleanup work along the Columbia River, $15.8 million to continue decontaminating and demolishing the Plutonium Finishing Plant and $8 million for digging up barrels of plutonium-contaminated waste and sending them to a repository in New Mexico.

In addition, it includes $14 million for ground water protection and cleanup work in central Hanford and $5 million for urgent infrastructure maintenance.

The bill also has other money for Hanford-related projects, including $1 million to preserve B Reactor, the world's first full-scale production reactor. It produced the plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, helping end World War II. Tri-City supporters would like B Reactor to be saved as a museum.

The bill adds $10 million to the $8 million already requested by the Bush administration to plan and design new laboratory space for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Nearly 1,000 lab employees must leave offices and lab space in Hanford's 300 Area that are being demolished as part of the Hanford cleanup effort. The $10 million will be used for construction.

The bill also includes $7.5 million for the Volpentest HAMMER training center.

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