Washington (Platts)--4May2009

US lawmakers are set to consider legislation later this week that could
significantly alter America's policy for disposing of spent fuel from nuclear
power plants.

The bill, which is slated for a vote on Wednesday in the Senate Energy
and Natural Resources Committee, would establish an 11-member commission to
study various options for dealing with the tens of thousands of tons of spent
fuel stacking up at nuclear power plants across the US.

The proposed committee reflects the wishes of the Obama administration,
which earlier in 2009 abandoned a nearly 25-year-old US government plan to
send the waste to the still-incomplete Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said that building Yucca Mountain is no
longer "an option" for safety and environmental reasons, an argument that has
drawn fire from the US nuclear energy industry and its Republican allies in
Congress.

The bill to be considered this week would task the commission to study
several options for dealing with the waste, including storing it long-term at
the plants where it is used.

The committee would also consider the pros and cons of establishing one
or more "regional storage facilities" for the waste, according to a draft of
the bill released by the Senate panel.

The bill would also require the committee to study "reprocessing," an
approach using chemicals and other means to create new fuel from the waste.

Reprocessing would represent a radical shift in US policy, as President
Carter banned the practice in 1977 for fear that rogue nations and terrorists
could acquire the plutonium and other nuclear materials that the process would
generate. President Reagan later lifted the ban, but the US has still not
engaged in reprocessing.

The draft bill would also task the committee with studying "deep geologic
disposal" of the spent fuel, which is the approach that the Yucca Mountain
project would have used.

But selecting a location for a national nuclear waste dump would likely
meet great resistance in Congress, as most lawmakers would not want such a
facility in their states or districts.

Under the draft bill, the committee could not recommend a new repository
or a regional storage facility unless it determined that there was a
"reasonable assurance that the public and the environment will be adequately
protected from the hazards" posed by the facility. Moreover, the facility
would have to be "acceptable to the public," the draft bill says.

The committee would also study "alternative approaches" to dealing with
the US' nuclear waste, including establishing a "private corporation" for
handling the job, the draft bill says.

That idea was floated during the Bush administration, when Republican
lawmakers considered transferring the Yucca Mountain program from the
Department of Energy to a "non-governmental entity."

Under the bill, the commission's 11 members, including its chairman,
would be appointed by the president. That would be a small victory for the
nuclear industry, which has expressed concerns that some of the members would
be chosen by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat who has vowed never
to allow the Yucca Mountain project to open in his home state of Nevada.

In another probable concession to the industry, the bill says that no
more than six members of one party -- likely Democrats -- would serve on the
11-member panel, and that it would be "fairly balanced in terms of the points
of view represented." But the bill offers no details on how that balance would
be achieved.

The commission would have two years to submit its policy recommendations
to the White House and Congress.

--Brian Hansen, brian_hansen@platts.com