Official: States Should Withhold Money for Yucca

Jun 26 - Las Vegas Review - Journal

States that are growing frustrated over delays at Yucca Mountain should consider withholding millions of dollars that utility ratepayers contribute each year into the project's construction fund, the safety adviser to the governor of Maine said in a speech Wednesday to a nuclear waste conference.

The nuclear waste fund has now raised $28 billion but only about $8 billion has been approved by Congress to be spent on the repository project managed by the Department of Energy.

A bill that would change the accounting so that Congress might find it easier to appropriate larger sums has been stalled.

In the meantime, states that draw electricity from nuclear power plants are conveying consumer fees - about $750 million a year - to the federal government for nuclear waste disposal.

Illinois has contributed $3.4 billion since the fund was established in the early 1980s, and 11 other states have contributed $1 billion or more, according to conference participants.

"The states should withhold the money," said Charles Pray, nuclear safety adviser to Maine Gov. John Baldacci.

Officials in Maine are seeking the removal of nuclear waste in the form of 1,434 spent fuel assemblies stored at the decommissioned Maine Yankee Atomic Power plant in Wicasset.

"There may be some legal stallers who say that can't be done," Pray said.

"Some utilities will say that would violate their contracts. But the DOE has already broken contracts" by failing to have a waste repository opened by an agreed upon 1998 date.

No new date has been set for repository operations.

Pray's speech opened a two-day meeting of the U.S. Transport Council, a coalition of companies focused on nuclear waste shipping issues.

Pray urged participants to step up lobbying Congress.

"It is a question of political will," Pray said.

"Congress has been insulated but if we can get them to focus on this issue it would be surprising what could get done."

In a luncheon speech, Brew Barron, chief nuclear officer of Duke Energy, which operates nuclear plants in North Carolina and South Carolina, urged "patience and a sense of realism."

"There is understandable frustration amongst ratepayers and regulators and utilities that have put a lot of money into the waste fund, and there can be a tendency to say let's just get (nuclear waste) off our sites," Barron said.

"But just moving it off the sites without creating certainty of where the waste is going to go and how it is going to get there is not success. We have to keep our eye on the ball."

"We are talking about isolating waste for thousands and thousands of years," Barron said.