Taxpayers to Owe Billions for Nuclear Waste Storage

[Susan L Gawarecki <loc@icx.net>]

Taxpayers to Owe Billions for Nuclear Waste Storage

September 26, 2002

The New York Times



By MATTHEW L. WALD



WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 — A federal appeals court has ruled that billions

of dollars in damages that the Energy Department is likely to owe to

nuclear reactor owners for its failure to store nuclear waste will have

to come from taxpayers, not electricity consumers.



The Energy Department signed contracts with reactor owners in the early

1980's promising to accept their wastes for burial beginning in January

1998, in exchange for payments from them based on electricity

production. To date, reactor owners have paid more than $10.5 billion.



But now the department says it cannot take waste until 2010, and the

operators of the reactors are suing because they have been forced to

store the waste on site.



Many experts say the storage cannot start for many years, because of

uncertainties about Yucca Mountain, the site near Las Vegas that the

government has chosen as its waste repository.



Estimates of the damages run from $2 billion to $60 billion, and the

decision, from the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit,

in Atlanta, twice used the word "nebulous" to describe them. At the

National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, which is made

up of state officials, Brian J. O'Connell, the director of the Nuclear

Waste Program office, said the number would run "in the billions." Asked

if it would reach tens of billions, Mr. O'Connell, said, "It gets

fuzzy."



He said that one utility, Northern States Power of Minnesota, put its

costs at $1 billion because it might be forced to shut three reactors

prematurely, for want of storage space for the radioactive waste.



The only settlement so far is much smaller. The department and the

owners of the three-reactor Peach Bottom plant, in the Pennsylvania town

of the same name, agreed on $80 million, to pay extra costs for storing

the wastes on site, in giant steel and concrete casks. But 13 other

reactor owners sued to block the deal, because the money would have come

from the Nuclear Waste Fund, money from power customers that they said

was supposed to be used only to open a permanent repository.



In a decision dated Sept. 24, the appeals court ruled that money in the

fund can only be used for permanent disposal. The court said that the

Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the law that allowed the contracts, called for

a quid pro quo "in which each utility roughly pays the costs of

disposing of its waste and no more." The plan, the court said was for a

system in which the burden of the government's breach of contract would

"fall on the government, not other utilities."



A lawyer for the plaintiffs, Jay E. Silberg, said that if the Energy

Department could use the money collected from utilities to pay damages

to the utilities, the department would be "robbing Peter to pay Peter."



"The lesson learned from the court's ruling is that we need to move

forward with the Yucca Mountain Project," said Joseph H. Davis, a

spokesman for the Department of Energy.



At the Regulatory Utility Commissioners group, Mr. O'Connell said the

decision was a victory because "ratepayers had some assurance that the

nuclear waste fund would continue to be used for its intended purpose."

But he acknowledged that if the burden shifted to taxpayers, it would be

paid by most of the same people. "There's about an 80 percent

convergence," he said.



-- 

.....................................................

Susan L. Gawarecki, Ph.D., Executive Director

Oak Ridge Reservation Local Oversight Committee

102 Robertsville Road, Suite B, Oak Ridge, TN 37830

Toll free 888-770-3073 ~ www.local-oversight.org

.....................................................

************************************************************************

You are currently subscribed to the Radsafe mailing list. To unsubscribe,

send an e-mail to Majordomo@list.vanderbilt.edu  Put the text "unsubscribe

radsafe" (no quote marks) in the body of the e-mail, with no subject line.

You can view the Radsafe archives at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/radsafe/