Washington (Platts)--17Dec2007
A fiscal 2008 catch-all spending bill Congress made public late Sunday
would offer loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants, but cut funding for
US Department of Energy programs to help deal with spent nuclear fuel.
The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, an experimental DOE program that
seeks to reprocess nuclear spent fuel by burning it in commercial power
reactors, would receive less than half the $395 million the president
requested for fiscal 2008.
Nuclear energy proponent Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico, who serves
as ranking Republican on the subcommittee that drafted the energy and water
development section of the omnibus spending measure, applauded the
$179-million allotment. "Just two years ago, DOE only budgeted $67 million for
the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative," he said Monday in a statement. "Today,
the conferees have provided nearly 2.5 times that level." Domenici is the
senior Republican on the Senate Appropriations Energy and Water Development
subcommittee.
Domenici, however, acknowledged that the bill would cut funding for DOE's
program to develop an underground repository for high-level nuclear waste at
Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Under the measure, the program would receive a
$189-million allotment, down from the $494.5 million the department had
requested. Domenici predicted that the shortfall would cause DOE to miss its
June deadline to submit a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission.
But DOE on Monday said the funding reduction would not affect its ability
to meet the June deadline.
Investors in new nuclear power plants fared well in the bill. Where the
House-passed measure would have excluded the technology altogether from its $7
billion loan-guarantee budget, the omnibus measure would provide $20.5 billion
to guarantee loans for new nuclear plants only. An additional $18 billion
would be provided for other technologies, including renewable energy and
energy efficiency, and clean coal. While the proposed spending level far
exceeds the Bush administration's $9 billion request, it is smaller than the
$45 billion figure that was circulating late last week.
--Jean Chemnick, jean_chemnick@platts.com
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