[ RadSafe ] NYT Editorial: Lack of Budget Could Hurt Nuclear Energy Revival

[John Jacobus]

I am surprised no one had posted this.

NYT TIMES
January 23, 2007

Lack of Budget Could Hurt Nuclear Energy Revival,
Official Says

By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 — The senior member of the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission warned on Monday that the
failure
of Congress to pass a detailed budget for the current
fiscal year could damage the nuclear renaissance that
the government tried so hard to encourage with the
energy bill of 2005.

No one has applied for permission to build a power
reactor since the 1970s. But with the incentives
offered by the federal government in 2005, utilities
are considering building about 20 reactors, and
several of them are expected to apply for
authorization this year.

The commission member, Edward McGaffigan Jr., said
that if the commission received applications this
year, “we basically are going to have to put them on
the shelf, because we’re not going to have the folks
to work on the applications until well into calendar
year 2008.”

Congress passed only 2 of the 11 spending bills for
the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, 2006, those
covering the Pentagon and the Homeland Security
Department. The rest of the government has been
operating under a “continuing resolution,” a stopgap
measure that finances most agencies at the previous
year’s levels. Democrats say they plan to extend that
resolution through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal
year.

According to the nuclear commission, under a
continuing resolution its budget would be lower by $95
million, or about 12 percent, compared with the level
approved by the House and Senate Appropriations
Committees but never by the full Congress.

Most of the commission’s budget comes from fees paid
by companies licensed to use radioactive material. The
agency has been arguing on Capitol Hill that giving it
the amount already approved by the Appropriations
Committees would require only $13 million of general
tax revenues. 

Mr. McGaffigan said that if the commission could not
process applications, some companies wanting to build
would decide to wait. But he said that “some, seeing
the instability, may disappear” and build coal plants
instead.

Earlier this month, Mr. McGaffigan, saying he had
metastatic melanoma, told the White House that he
would serve only until a successor could be confirmed.
He spoke Monday at a meeting with reporters organized
by Platts, an energy information company. 

Mr. McGaffigan also said that the Energy Department
should begin looking for alternatives to Yucca
Mountain, in Nevada, for disposing of nuclear waste.
When he came to the commission in 1996, he said, the
opening of the repository was said to be 14 years
away; now it is probably 20 years away. 

“There’s just tremendous uncertainty,” he said, “and
each year that passes, we’re not going to get any
closer to Yucca under the current circumstances.” He
said the government should look for a site where there
was local cooperation.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

+++++++++++++++++++
“We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient — that we are only 6 percent of the world’s population; that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind; that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity; and therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”
-- John F. Kennedy 

-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail:  crispy_bird at yahoo.com


 
____________________________________________________________________________________
Bored stiff? Loosen up... 
Download and play hundreds of games for free on Yahoo! Games.
http://games.yahoo.com/games/front