Activists Urge Stronger Security at N-Plants

Sep 14 - Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

An anti-nuclear group, in congressional testimony submitted Wednesday, emphasized the Interior Department's rejection of Private Fuel Storage's lease in Tooele County as evidence of the need for stronger security at nuclear power plants.

Interim storage of nuclear waste has received increased attention from the House and Senate in the last year, with each chamber coming up with different proposals that would make interim storage an option for the Energy Department, although whether any plan will make it through Congress this year is unclear.

Michele Boyd, legislative director of the Public Citizen's energy program, told the House Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee that making on-site storage at nuclear power plants more secure should be the only focus now, because "the United States does not have a near- term solution for the permanent storage of high-level nuclear waste."

"National focus should be on addressing the threats from this waste, not on wasting resources on a failed repository program, a dangerous reprocessing program or interim away-from-reactor storage," Boyd said.

Last week, the Bureau of Indian Affairs rejected the lease between Private Fuel Storage and the Skull Valley Band of the Goshutes to store more than 40,000 tons of nuclear waste on Goshute land in Tooele County. The Bureau of Land Management also rejected a PFS request to use certain tracts of public land to help with its transportation plan.

PFS aimed to store nuclear waste until the federal government opened a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The White House, a majority of lawmakers and the nuclear industry strongly support the Yucca plan, but the site might not open until 2017. It was supposed to open in 1998, and now utilities are having to deal with what to do with their waste until it opens.

Boyd, in her written testimony, said the lack of a transportation plan, inadequate law enforcement, lack of an environmental study on the effects of a terrorist attack and uncertainty about the availability of a permanent federal repository all led the Interior Department to reject the PFS lease.

In the lease decision handed down last week, the Bureau of Indian Affairs said the PFS plan left too much uncertainty about when the nuclear waste would actually leave the reservation for a permanent storage site.

Boyd used this point to argue against storage of waste in any place but at the reactors that generate it, saying the so-called temporary sites "would become long-term 'overflow parking' for high- level radioactive wastes with nowhere else to go."

"The most sensible action in the near-term is to require hardened on-site storage," she said.

Utah's entire congressional delegation has co-sponsored a bill with Nevada's congressional delegation that would allow the Energy Department to pay for on-site storage until the government found another storage solution beyond Yucca Mountain.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton said Wednesday that he would not support any interim storage proposal except putting waste temporarily in Nevada somewhere at the Yucca site until the waste would actually be put into the mountain.

"I don't want interim storage to be the stopping horse not to do Yucca Mountain," Barton said.

Nuclear utilities also do not want to see money taken away from Yucca and put toward interim projects.

"A dollar spent on interim storage is a dollar not spent on the repository," said Stan Wise, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, who testified on behalf of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

Wise and other nuclear industry officials argue that leaving nuclear waste on site does not fulfill the Nuclear Waste Policy Act's requirement of permanent geologic disposal, which is what Yucca Mountain would do.

E-mail: suzanne@desnews.com