Monday, May. 11, 2009

Quick answer unlikely for nuclear hot potato

By Rick Larson, Herald Managing Editor

A piece of President Obama’s budget that hasn’t drawn as much attention as other high-profile programs would finally bury the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project in Nevada.

Scrapping Yucca Mountain will leave a $13.5 billion hole in the ground, which is how much the Department of Energy has spent on the project since 1983, and it leaves unanswered the question of what to do with waste from nuclear power plants. It’s a question the nation has struggled with for some 30 years.

Yucca Mountain’s death knell was only a matter of time, as Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, who’s Senate majority leader, had promised to shut it down because his state doesn’t want all of the nation’s nuclear trash.

Obama’s proposed budget includes $197 million for the Yucca Mountain project, according to The Associated Press. But the budget directs that the money be spent to “explore alternatives” to the Nevada project, and stipulates that no money would go for site access work, engineering or land purchases.

The waste repository program isn’t a project being funded through some abstract government borrowing program. It’s funded by everyone who uses utility company electricity.

Under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, power users have paid one-tenth of a cent for every kilowatt-hour used. The money originally was intended to help find the best site in the nation for a nuclear repository by evaluating the suitability of several sites. The proposed deep underground repository originally was supposed to be ready to start taking spent fuel from the nation’s nuclear power plants in 1998 — a deadline obviously badly blown.

At one point, Hanford was considered as a potential site. Millions of dollars were spent tunneling a half-mile deep into the basalt rock at Hanford’s Gable Mountain until Congress decided in 1987 to concentrate all efforts on the Nevada site.

At that time, Nevada had little political power — but as is very evident now, politics is fluid.

The Department of Energy’s website reports that a total of $29.6 billion had been collected for the nation’s Nuclear Waste Fund as of Dec. 31. That included money appropriated by Congress and collected by the states.

Washington state electric rate payers had contributed $157 million of that — Oregon $76 million.

Scrapping Yucca Mountain isn’t as simple, however, as just walking away from a massive hole in the ground. The problem of what to do with the 55,000 tons of used nuclear fuel sitting in 39 states in “temporary” storage at nuclear power plants — including the Energy Northwest plant at Hanford — remains.

And lawmakers from states with nuclear plants are getting angry, threatening to stop or reduce their payments to the federal government for nuclear waste management until a solution for nuclear waste emerges. The New York Times reported in April that at least four states — Maine, South Carolina, Michigan and Minnesota — were considering measures.

All of this comes as nuclear power plants are being promoted as potential sources of clean and reliable base power. Or, at least, they would be “clean” if a reliable method of handling their waste was developed, whether safe disposal or fuel reprocessing.

Don’t expect a quick answer to this riddle, though. This is a hot potato that’s been tossed back and forth for almost 30 years, and nobody wants to be the one left holding the responsibility for it.

Rick Larson: 582-1522; rlarson@tricityherald.com

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