Nov 18 - McClatchy-Tribune Business News Formerly Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - Luther Turmelle New Haven Register, Conn.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell is one of 18 governors protesting proposed legislation to use money from utility ratepayers to create temporary sites around the country where spent nuclear fuel would be stored until a national repository can be built.

Rell and the 17 other governors sent a letter Thursday to chairmen and ranking members of the U.S. House and Senate Appropriations Committees opposing a version of a fiscal 2007 Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act.

The letter comes three months after Rell and other governors wrote to congressional leaders expressing concern that legislation being considered by federal lawmakers could force Connecticut and other states where spent nuclear fuel is stored to automatically become temporary sites.

"This is something that the governor wants to make sure is kept on the front burner," said Adam Liegeot, a Rell spokesman. Rell and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine spearheaded the letter-writing effort, he said.

The real fear of officials in Connecticut and other states is that the temporary sites will ultimately become permanent storage locations, he said.

Spent nuclear fuel is stored on the site of the former Connecticut Yankee Nuclear plant in Haddam and at Millstone Nuclear Power plant in Waterford.

"The bottom line is, Governor Rell is not going to sit idly by and allow these temporary facilities to become de facto final resting places for nuclear waste," Liegeot said.

The letter from the governors criticizes the appropriations legislation for "providing the Department of Energy with new, expansive authority to create numerous nuclear waste storage sites that represents a retreat from language of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and its establishment of a centralized repository."

"Shifting the federal program's focus away from a repository to the construction, licensing and operation of many interim storage sites across the country could harm disposal efforts irreparably," the letter says.

"Furthermore, Section 313 (of the Appropriations Act) would direct the department to establish new state and regional waste storage sites without the consent and over the potential objections of governors. This is wholly unacceptable to our constituents and to us," the letter continues.

The Connecticut Yankee plant, which was closed in 1996, has 40 steel and concrete casks, known as dry storage. Millstone has dry storage and wet storage, the latter being a building in which super-hot bundles of spent nuclear fuel rods are stored in water for five to seven years before being moved to dry storage.

The federal government in the early 1980s established a fund to build a centralized, permanent storage facility at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles north of Las Vegas.

But the project has seen numerous construction delays and isn't expected to be completed until 2017.

That resulted in a number of lawsuits by a variety of nuclear power plant operators -- including the consortium that operated Connecticut Yankee -- claiming federal energy officials broke a contractual promise to have a centralized storage site in operation by 1998.

Liegeot said the governor sees the appropriations bill as a "plan that has been hatched without any state input."