Seeking a 'Plan B' for nuclear waste: With Yucca Mountain site dead, billions paid into project are in limbo.

Margaret Newkirk /Staff/1343 words/4 April 2010/The Atlanta Journal - Constitution
Copyright (c) 2010 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, All Rights Reserved

Georgia electric customers paid the U.S. government more than $701 million over nearly three decades, in exchange for a service now 12 years overdue. Today, the U.S. government is as far away from delivering on its part of the bargain as it has ever been. Electric customers not only can't easily get their money back --- Congress borrowed it for other things --- but must keep on paying. That's a snapshot view of the nation's Nuclear Waste Fund.
The fund was supposed to pay the U.S. Department of Energy to remove radioactive waste from power plants. But that hasn't happened, and the recent decision to scrap the Yucca Mountain waste project in Nevada has left the DOE essentially in a position of starting over.

Like electric customers around the country, Georgia power customers paid pennies per month to the waste fund: It cost a typical Georgia household 20 cents this month. They paid the pennies for 27 years, swelling the waste fund to $31 billion.
In exchange, by 1998, the DOE was supposed to take ownership of radioactive waste from nuclear reactors around the country, including Atlanta-based Southern Co.'s Vogtle and Hatch plants in Georgia and its Plant Farley in Alabama.
The agency planned to bury the waste under Yucca Mountain in Nevada's Mojave Desert.
But as that project dragged on, utilities and their customers paid to build storage to keep waste on-site even as they kept paying the DOE to take it away.
That has inspired a donnybrook of litigation, still years from being over. Georgians paid for that, too, both as ratepayers and taxpayers.
The Obama administration had signaled its intentions to drop the Yucca Mountain plan last year. After spending $7 billion in waste fund money and $3 billion in taxpayer dollars on the project, last month the DOE withdrew its Nuclear Regulatory Commission license application for Yucca, saying the site wasn't suitable.
The DOE now has no place to put the waste and no plan, although it says the Waste Fund money will eventually be needed to pay for whatever alternatives emerge.
Customers are still paying their pennies into the fund. Nationally, they'll pay an estimated $770 million this fiscal year.
The Yucca collapse comes as nuclear utilities, led by Southern Co., build new reactors for the first time in decades.
Politics, science, bad management and oddly inadequate funding stymied the plan to store radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain, said Brian O'Connell of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, or NARUC.
"There were management problems in the beginning, creative delaying tactics by the state of Nevada, not getting a permit for this, not getting a permit for that," O'Connell said.
Nevada never welcomed the repository. Congress chose Yucca over two other sites in states with far more congressional clout than Nevada had at the time.
The appropriations process was also slow, O'Connell said. Even as the waste fund built its huge surplus, Congress didn't appropriate enough money to manage the program well, he said.
Yucca also had regulatory issues. Opposing geologists and environmentalists had consistently said the site wasn't suited to storing radioactive waste long term.
Then the definition of "long-term" got longer. The DOE originally had to show that Yucca could control radiation for 10,000 years. But in 2004, in response to litigation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency upped that to 1 million years.
The new time frame reflected a National Academy of Sciences assessment that some waste wouldn't reach peak radioactivity for hundreds of thousands of years.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu would later cite the new million-year timeline as part of the reason the DOE gave up on Yucca, saying the site's geology might not remain stable that long.
Meanwhile, utilities were spending their own money on interim on-site storage for used radioactive nuclear fuel rods.
Those rods go into deep pools of water initially. But the pools eventually fill up.
That's what happened at Southern Co.'s Plant Hatch near Baxley. Plant Hatch began moving used fuel rods to new, on-land casks in 2000, said Carrie Phillips, a spokeswoman for Southern Nuclear. The cost was folded into the rates paid by customers of Southern Co.'s Georgia Power.
Southern is among 71 nuclear utilities that have sued the DOE for breach of contract regarding waste disposal, according to a December report from the Congressional Research Service. The utilities have won $1.2 billion in damages, though most of the cases are still tied up in DOE appeals.Southern won a $77 million judgment against the DOE in 2007, related to the added costs to ratepayers through 2004. The case is under appeal. Southern is readying a second lawsuit related to more recent costs of storing waste. "Damages will continue to accumulate until the issue is resolved," Phillips said.
The DOE has spent $150 million litigating the cases, and utilities have spent between $5 million and $7 million per case, the congressional report said. The Energy Department has estimated its total liability at $12.3 billion. The nuclear utilities estimate it at $50 billion. Both figures assume that the DOE would begin removing waste from nuclear plants by 2020.
Given the cancellation of Yucca, that's "an unlikely occurrence," the congressional report said.
As the Yucca project faded, utility regulators, the nuclear industry and some politicians demanded that customers receive refunds or at least stop paying into the waste fund. One refund bid, introduced by U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), was called the "Rebating America's Deposit Act."
But the likelihood of a refund is slim, and even the industry isn't pushing for that, given that the DOE still has to find and fund a waste solution.
Instead of a refund, the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group, has asked that the DOE suspend collections for the waste fund, at least until it comes up with a plan. So has NARUC, the national regulators' group. The Georgia Public Service Commission also supports a suspension.
So far, the DOE has refused suspension requests. The fees are required by law, reviewed annually and "will pay the cost of the eventual, long-term disposition of the materials with alternatives to Yucca Mountain," said spokeswoman Jennifer Lee.
Meanwhile, a new "blue ribbon" commission of nuclear experts held its first meeting in Washington 10 days ago.Their charge: Come up with a Plan B.ExclusiveWaste alternatives
Here are some of the storage options being discussed in the wake of the Yucca project shutdown:

Salt domes: DOE Secretary Steven Chu has said salt domes --- giant underground caverns of salt --- have proven to be stable for millions of years and could safely contain nuclear waste for the periods now required by the U.S. EPA.
Recycling: Recycling spent nuclear fuel to retrieve usable uranium and plutonium cuts down on the total amount of waste, and the time it would remain dangerous. The waste would still require long-term storage, though. The U.S. stopped developing recycling capability in the 1970s due to concerns that it could contribute to nuclear weapons proliferation.
Other ideas: Scientists have also explored burying waste in deep sea trenches or shooting it in rockets into the sun.
Source: National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners