NUCLEAR REACTION

The history of nuclear waste disposal in the United States is one of broken promises, wasted money, obfuscation and delays – decades worth of them. It may get worse as incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has declared the federally designated repository in his home state of Nevada to be “dead.” For states such as Maine, which are holding nuclear waste that was supposed to be deposited at Yucca Mountain, this is unacceptable.

It is also illegal. A federal court earlier this fall ordered the Department of Energy to pay more than $75.8 million to Maine Yankee for failing to abide by federal law requiring that the department provide a disposal site by Jan. 31, 1998. The department has appealed the decision, but if any damage award is upheld, the money would be returned to ratepayers, most of whom are in Maine.

The damage award pales next to the $24 billion the nation’s electric ratepayers have paid to research and develop a permanent storage site and to store nuclear waste at reactor sites in the interim. An estimated $6 billion has been spent so far on Yucca Mountain. Billions more are being spent to store waste at current and former nuclear power plants, including Maine Yankee in Wiscasset.

Faced with the reality that Yucca Mountain was decades behind schedule and continues to face political and legal challenges, New Mexico Republican Sen. Pete Domenici, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, proposed that federal money for Yucca Mountain be diverted to the states to pay for storage at interim sites. This would have been a reasonable compromise if governors and others had reason to trust that the federal government would agree on a final storage site and that the 126 storage sites scattered around the country would be short-lived. There is no basis for such trust.

Fortunately, the new chair of the committee, Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, opposes the dispersed storage plan and wants to move forward on Yucca Mountain.

Sen. Reid’s threats aside, disposing of waste at Yucca Mountain is settled policy for Congress. The Department of Energy began studying the suitability of Yucca Mountain as a long-term repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in 1978.

In July 2002, President Bush signed legislation officially establishing Yucca Mountain as the nation’s nuclear waste repository. It is supposed to begin accepting waste in 2017. The Department of Energy is currently in the process of preparing an application to obtain the Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to proceed with construction of the repository.

Switching to another site or multiple sites, which would be harder to secure, makes no sense. Further, as discussions about alternatives to fossil fuels get more serious, nuclear power is likely to be part of the conversation. It can’t be seriously considered until waste disposal is settled.

Congress has slowly, expensively and deliberately settled on Yucca Mountain. Now is not the time to change course for political gain.