Triay says Yucca decision won't delay Hanford cleanup; Murkowski differs

 Derek Sands, Elaine Hiruo /907 words/22 March 2010/Inside Energy/IE/13/ISSN: 1556-3928/English/(c) 2010 McGraw-Hill, Inc. /

The Obama administration's decision to terminate a long-planned nuclear-waste repository in Nevada will not disrupt the Energy Department's cleanup schedule at a highly contaminated Hanford Site in Washington state, a senior DOE official said last week, despite warnings from a prominent senator that delays will occur and states will file lawsuits in response."It is not slowing down the current work," Ines Triay, assistant secretary for environmental management, said at a hearing Wednesday. "We are talking about that decision not being on the critical path, not preventing the cleanup at Hanford to move forward. ... [Current] activities do not necessitate a decision for disposal, especially because we are going to be producing a very protective waste form." Waste from Hanford, a former nuclear weapons facility, was destined for the national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada until the administration decided to kill the project last year. Washington's attorney general, Rob McKenna, has expressed concern that the decision will mean delays at Hanford, one of the largest nuclear cleanup projects in the world.
Earlier this month, DOE asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to withdraw the department's license application for the Yucca Mountain site, prompting protests from Washington state and others.

Triay said a decision on a new national plan for waste disposal can be put off for "decades" before it would affect the cleanup schedule at Hanford. Current plans call for that work to continue through the late 2040s, at a minimum, she said.

Removal of high-level radioactive waste from other DOE defense sites in South Carolina and Idaho will also be unaffected by the decision, she said.

Triay's comments, however, came as opposition to the DOE decision continues.

Senator Lisa Murkowski blasted the department's decision in a Senate floor speech last week, saying it could result in states with nuclear defense sites suing DOE over radioactive waste that might be stranded there, much as utilities have taken the department to court for missing a 1998 deadline to start taking spent fuel off their hands.

"Just as utilities have sued the federal government for a breach of contract, the decision to terminate Yucca could open the door to a lawsuit from a state like Idaho, which has a court-approved agreement with the Department of Energy to remove nuclear waste from the state by 2035," said Murkowski, the senior Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

She said 13 states have contaminated former nuclear-weapons operations — including the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and Idaho National Laboratory — that have high-level waste that would remain at the sites until the US decides on a new national plan.

South Carolina has already taken action, suing the federal government in the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals over the planned termination of the Yucca Mountain project. The state also filed a petition to intervene with an NRC licensing board objecting to DOE's March 3 request to withdraw the project's application. South Carolina's Aiken County, home to SRS, has also sued DOE over the decision.

Separately, the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners said last week that DOE's decision on the repository will delay by at least 25 years the department's ability to move spent fuel off power reactor sites. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said it will be safe to store spent civilian reactor fuel on-site for up to 50 years while a solution is developed to deal with it.

NARUC, which represents state utility regulators, filed a petition with the NRC board Monday saying "the billions expended for the licensing proceeding would be wasted, and the long-term nuclear waste storage process would be back at square one," if DOE is allowed to withdraw the application.

The Prairie Island Indian Community, whose tribal land is adjacent to Xcel Energy's Prairie Island nuclear power plant in Minnesota, also filed a petition with NRC Monday protesting DOE's application withdrawal.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act, originally enacted in 1982 and amended in 1987, designated Yucca Mountain the county's sole candidate for a repository for the disposal of high-level nuclear waste.

DOE's March 3 motion came about two years after the department, under the Bush administration, filed the project's application with NRC.

Under the law, nuclear utility ratepayers are charged one-tenth of a cent fee for every kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity sold by power companies supplying them. The fee is deposited into the Nuclear Waste Fund, a federal trust fund, to bankroll the DOE civilian nuclear waste program.

The fund's current balance, including interest, is about $21 billion. About $10 billion has been spent on the DOE program since 1983. Interest paid into the fund approaches $1 billion a year and waste fee payments total about $770 million a year.
DOE signed contracts with nuclear utilities in 1983 to begin disposing of their spent fuel by January 31, 1998. After the department missed the deadline, 71 companies sued the federal government for damages in an effort to recover the cost of prolonged onsite storage of their spent fuel. More than 60,000 metric tons of spent fuel is stored at reactor sites, and the inventory grows at a rate of about 2,000 metric tons a year.
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