Everyone involved will readily admit that figuring out where to bury US nuclear waste has proven a daunting task.
Congress authorized the search for a national repository site, where both Cold War military waste and civilian spent fuel could be safely buried, in 1982. Some $20 billion later, there’s a closed-up hole in the ground in Nevada … and engineering studies, consultant evaluations, policy tomes, procedural filings, and litigation that could probably fill the hole to overflowing.
But over three decades, there’s one thing very hard to find: anyone involved with a real incentive to resolve this problem.
Continuing an endless series of studies, research, litigation and debate, on the other hand, is very much in virtually everyone’s interests – except, of course, the general public which is paying for all this through electric bills and taxes.
Those are the two sources of money for this venture. General federal taxes pay for the portion of the waste problem attributed to bomb research, manufacture and maintenance, while a mil – a tenth of a cent – levy is added to every nuclear kilowatt-hour generated in the US to cover the future disposal of the fuel making the power.
The levy is supposed to ensure nuclear fuel pays for its own disposal, and so far it has been wildly successful. U.S. nuclear plants have been generating around 800 billion kilowatt-hours a year, and the trust fund where the levies go has received more than $30 billion over the years. There’s no end to that levy – the trust fund keeps getting money till the last nuclear generator shuts.
It has been so successful that Congress hasn’t wanted to appropriate from the trust fund. While the money can’t legally be spent for anything else, federal budget officials (across multiple administrations) have “scored” the trust fund as part of the overall budget. Money sitting in the trust fund masks money spent elsewhere. So as the trust fund has accumulated, DOE has struggled annually to get Congress to appropriate money out of it for spent fuel disposal programs.
Overall about $20 billion has been spent on waste disposal siting since 1982. According to the Government Accountability Office, spending to study whether to build a spent fuel repository at Yucca Mountain alone over the last 29 years has cost us some $15 billion, about $9.5 billion from our electric bill levy and $5.5 billion in taxes.
Other sites were considered from 1982 to 1987, when Congress picked Yucca Mountain, near the Nevada Test Site where bombs had been tested both above and below ground. Congress has not changed that designation, and the law orders DOE to apply for an NRC license for the facility, which DOE did in 2008. Nevada asserts the site is unsuitable, and has fought the facility at every step.
Current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid built his career on trying to get the Yucca decision reversed. With Reid’s ascendancy in the Senate, President Obama’s agreement to kill Yucca in 2009, and Obama’s appointing former Reid aide Gregory Jazcko to chair the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Yucca plans have ground to a halt. DOE tried to withdraw its application, but NRC’s independent licensing board cited the law and balked. Jazcko single-handedly stopped NRC staff work on license, though the work was essentially done. Questions have been raised at the House Energy & Commerce Committee about whether Jazcko’s tactics were proper, or even legal.
No matter – work has been halted. And what’s the option? There seems little chance Congress will reopen the law naming Yucca Mountain, since that opens the chance another state could be anointed.
A presidential Blue Ribbon commission is about to make its recommendations, and whatever it says, there’s one certainty: it will call for more research, more studies, more … spending. Just as the last 29 years have seen a steady flow of dollars for research, engineering, and policy studies surrounding Yucca Mountain, the reversal on Yucca opens the door to more of the same.
And it is being paid for with your money, because … well, because the money is there. Most of the public has no idea they’re paying monthly for this.
So who has an interest in resolving the issues and getting something done?
Not DOE bureaucrats, scientists at national labs, contractors of all stripes with waste expertise – they’ve built careers and companies on the issue being open.
Ditto for nuclear opponents. As long as they can point to waste as a complex unsolved problem for nuclear power, they have what has proven a powerful argument to make the public question the wisdom of nuclear power.
And don’t forget lawyers for all sides, whose long-term prospects depend on continuing litigation over thorny issues.
While nuclear power plant operators want disposal resolved, they’re losing little in the meantime. Back in the 1980s, all the utilities signed fuel disposal contracts with DOE, in which DOE promised to start taking spent fuel on schedules beginning in 1998. That hasn’t happened, so courts have ruled DOE in breach of the contracts and ordered DOE to pay damages to utilities for costs of storing the fuel.
How much more tax money? GAO says just under $1 billion as of last Sept. 30 – plus $168 million in lawyers. The total liability by 2020 will be at least $15.4 billion – probably more, says GAO. Note this is general tax money, because DOE was found legally at fault. DOE can’t take the money from the trust fund.
Waiting in the wings: states with legacy facilities, many with DOE consent decrees committing the department to clean up the Cold War sites and move the worst of the waste to … where else? Yucca Mountain. They can also claim damages if DOE doesn’t meet court agreements.
The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners is attempting to get a court order suspending collection of the levy, on grounds DOE is not meeting its statutory responsibilities. It has tried unsuccessfully in the past to have the money put in an escrow account.
Nobody is saying finding a permanent high-level waste repository is going to be quick or easy – but then nobody saying that has any financial interest in a quick or easy solution. And with Congress deadlocked and unlikely to intervene, there’s only one certainty about nuclear waste disposal: we’re going to keep paying.