Nuclear waste chief asks Congress to remove repository roadblocks

Nuclear waste chief asks Congress to remove repository roadblocks

Washington (Platts)--19Jul2006

If the US Energy Department is to meet its 2017 deadline to open
the Yucca Mountain spent nuclear fuel repository, then it will need to be
unfettered by lawsuits and assured of adequate funding, the agency's new top
nuclear waste official said Wednesday.

Congress must pass legislation removing obstacles to the facility's
opening and annual spending bills that substantially meet administration
requests, Ward Sproat, DOE's director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive
Waste Management, said.

On a conference call in advance of a House Energy and Commerce Committee
hearing Wednesday on the Nevada repository, Sproat said: "The only people I
can hold accountable are the Department of Energy people and
organization...Congress can hold us accountable, but I can't reverse that."

Meeting the deadline is "very much dependent on Congress enacting
legislation," he added.

DOE has sent Congress a proposal that would set aside land for the
repository, give DOE access to water at the site and direct revenues from the
Nuclear Waste Fund to the Yucca Mountain Project.

The energy committee's chairman, Joe Barton, Republican-Texas, said
Tuesday there was "a reasonable chance" the House would pass a "fix Yucca"
bill during a lame duck session later in 2006. The Senate, however, has no
immediate plans to do so.

Sproat said the department plans to "meet or beat" its June 30, 2008,
schedule for sending an application for a license to build the repository to
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But he said that factors beyond DOE's
control could push back the 2017 schedule, which he called the "best
achievable."

The project has been dogged by repeated lawsuits by the state of Nevada
and environmental groups and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid,
Democrat-Nevada, who each year has prevented DOE from getting the money it
says it needs to do its repository work.

Sproat said the US government would rack up $7 billion in liabilities to
utilities--associated with the failure to meet contractual obligations to take
the waste--if the repository is not opened up in 2017 and lawsuits are not
settled before that. Plaintiffs in the lawsuits seeking damage have put DOE's
potential liability at closer to $50 billion.

Sproat also said a plan offered by Senator Pete Domenici,
Republican-New Mexico, the Senate Energy Committee chairman and the chairman
of the energy appropriations subcommittee, to open up several centralized
interim storage sites would not be easy to carry out. Domenici proposed the
plan as part of the fiscal 2007 spending bill.

Sproat said licensing and building storage facilities at already licensed
reactors takes about five years. "To go with a greenfield site, that isn't
already licensed, the licensing process is going to be a lot longer and to do
that at multiple sites, I'm not going to say that it can't be done, but its
going to be a challenge," he added.

---Dan Whitten, daniel_whitten@platts.com

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