New agency to control of US nuclear waste under Senate bill

Washington (Platts)--25Apr2013/1249 pm EDT/1649 GMT

Four senior US senators on Thursday released draft legislation to deal with nuclear waste now languishing at nuclear power plants around the country.

The bill would create a new federal agency for the task of disposing of that waste, give the new agency direct access to hundreds of millions of dollars in collected waste fees, and allow an interim storage facility to be built before a permanent site is chosen.

Differences over whether a consolidated interim storage site for commercial and defense nuclear waste can be built before a permanent repository is chosen have been a key hurdle to previous legislation.

"It is my hope that this discussion draft will help us quickly resolve the outstanding issues surrounding the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle, including whether progress on interim storage should be linked with the siting of a permanent repository," said Senator Lisa Murkowski, the senior Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Murkowski is working on the nuclear waste bill with Senator Ron Wyden, the energy committee's Democratic chairman, and the two senior lawmakers on the Senate panel that sets the Department of Energy's budget: Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, and Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican.

The senators, in a joint statement, asked for public comments on the draft bill before a final bill is introduced for congressional consideration, and included eight sections of technical questions to direct the responses, which address almost all aspects of the bill.

A 2012 nuclear waste bill, authored by now-former energy committee chairman Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, included provisions that would have required approval of a final, permanent repository before the siting of an interim storage site went through.

While Bingaman and others have been concerned about the potential for consent from the state and local community to be undercut if an interim site becomes a de facto permanent repository, Murkowski, Alexander and Feinstein objected to the provision, and the bill never progressed.

DOE has been in charge of the nuclear waste program, but after working on the Yucca Mountain national nuclear waste repository in Nevada for decades, and spending $15 billion on the effort, President Barack Obama moved to terminate it, citing opposition from the state.

The draft bill would also take away from DOE the responsibility for selecting, building and maintaining an interim storage facility and a permanent nuclear-waste repository and put it in the hands of a new federal agency, overseen by an oversight board including officials from the White House, the Army Corps of Engineers and DOE. Congress would still be required to approve any site.

That new agency would have expanded access to funds collected from ratepayers that rely on nuclear power. This so-called Nuclear Waste Funds now collects about $765 million a year, according to documents associated with the draft bill.

Newly collected money under the fund would be available to the new agency immediately without relying on congressional appropriators under the bill. The funds already collected, about $28.2 billion, would remain subject to appropriations.

In the wake of canceling Yucca Mountain, Obama set up an expert panel called the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, which spent two years examining options for dealing with spent nuclear fuel and nuclear waste.

The commission issued its final report last year, and the four senators involved in writing the bill have said they support much of what the commission recommended, and that was reflected in the bill released Thursday.

Key among those BRC recommendations was that the selection of an interim site and a permanent repository go forward only with the consent of the state and the local community. This was a key failure in the Yucca Mountain project, which retained local county support, but was heavily opposed at the state level.

In a document released along with the draft bill, Alexander separately proposed siting an interim facility and a permanent through different processes.

--Derek Sand, derek_sands@platts.com
--Edited by Keiron Greenhalgh, keiron_greenhalgh@platts.com

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