Doing nothing often has a cost — and when it comes to storing the nation’s nuclear waste, the price is $ 38 billion and rising.
That’s just the low-ball estimate for how much taxpayers will wind up spending because of the government’s decades of dithering about how to handle the radioactive leftovers sitting at dozens of sites in 38 states. The final price will be higher unless the government starts collecting the waste by 2020, which almost nobody who tracks the issue expects.
The first $ 15 billion is what the government spent on a controversial nuclear waste repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain until the Obama administration scrapped the project. The other $ 23 billion is the Energy Department’s estimate of the damages the government will have to pay to nuclear power utilities, which for the past 30 years have paid a fee to DOE on the promise that the feds would begin collecting their waste in 1998.
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Industry argues that the damages are closer to $ 50 billion — which raises the bottom line to $ 65 billion including the money spent on Yucca.
The cost of the refunds is little known to the public, but it’s such a huge liability that DOE tracks the figure closely. The government is still fighting the utilities’ claims in court, but utilities have been racking up a string of wins.
The costs of inaction don’t just include dollars. The lack of a final resting place for the waste means that each nuclear plant has to stockpile its own. Thousands of tons of waste are stranded at sites around the country, including at plants that have shut down.
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“I’m trying to think of some fancy words but at the end of the day it’s just a massive consumer rip-off,” said Greg White, a regulator on the Michigan Public Service Commission who also heads the nuclear waste panel for the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. NARUC, which represents state-level regulators, won a legal victory this month when the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered DOE to stop collecting the fee.
Salo Zelermyer, a former George W. Bush-era DOE attorney who works at the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani, says the waste program has “plainly broken down” and that the government had made “no discernable progress towards its commitments.”
Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz also expressed frustration this month, calling the system of storing nuclear waste at reactors sites “politically unsustainable.”
“For nuclear energy to be competitive here in the U.S. and ensure its safety and security abroad, we have to address the problem of disposition of used nuclear fuel and high-level waste,” Moniz said during a panel discussion at an American Nuclear Society meeting. He previously served on a blue-ribbon commission that advised Obama on changes to the nation’s nuclear waste policy.
But like others in the Obama administration, Moniz maintains that Yucca Mountain is not “a workable option.”
Congress chose the Nevada site in 1987 as the country’s sole permanent nuclear repository, but it continues to draw fierce opposition from many of the state’s residents and elected officials. One of its most powerful opponents is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who blocked funding for the project and pushed the Obama administration to kill it — something DOE did in 2010.
Reid and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) have long argued that the studies supporting the project were discredited because Congress short-circuited the site-selection process to focus solely on Yucca. The administration says the government needs to start over with a new waste site — and this time, the selection process must be “consent based” to win public acceptance.
“When this Administration took office, the timeline for opening Yucca Mountain had already been pushed back by two decades, stalled by public protest and legal opposition, with no end in sight,” DOE spokeswoman Niketa Kumar said in an email.
The end is still far off. DOE’s latest plan calls for a repository to open in 2048, although the department would try to open a temporary storage site by 2021. Even Yucca couldn’t be finished until at least 2027 if the government were to revive it immediately, the Government Accountability Office estimated last year.
Meanwhile, DOE’s Nuclear Waste Fund has amassed more than $ 25 billion after utilities — and their customers — have paid $ 750 million a year since 1983 through a 0.1-cent charge for each nuclear-generated kilowatt-hour of electricity. The fund will continue to generate about $ 1 billion in interest each year, even though the appeals court zeroed out DOE’s further collection of the fee until Congress passes a new nuclear waste program or the agency dusts off Yucca Mountain.
When it became clear DOE wasn’t fulfilling its end of the bargain, utilities began demanding that the government repay them for the costs they’ve incurred to store the waste on their own. They include the costs for reconfiguring the increasingly crowded spent-fuel pools, moving and packaging the used fuel rods and providing maintenance services such as on-site security.
Utilities have filed at least 61 lawsuits in the past 15 years over the broken promise. And bills have ramped up quickly.
The $38 billion nuclear waste fiasco
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