Sonal Patel reports that spent nuclear fuel has continued to accumulate at sites across the nation, paralyzed by a government deadlock on a nuclear waste management strategy formally established 35 years ago. Can recent developments offer a breakthrough? February marked 20 years since the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) defaulted on a “standard contract” with the nation’s reactor operators to begin disposing of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel (SNF) as required by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) of 1982. Despite a series of recent developments that could revive the Yucca Mountain deep geologic repository in Nevada, making it the final destination for the nation’s spent fuel, as required by amendments to NWPA in 1987, a long-standing political deadlock has left the U.S. with one option that has nearly every stakeholder attached to the nuclear power industry despondent ... to wait.
But waiting is a treacherous game. About 80,150 metric tons heavy metal (MTHM) of SNF—fuel withdrawn from a nuclear reactor following irradiation, which is referred to as “used” fuel by the nuclear industry because it contains potentially reusable uranium and plutonium—is in temporary storage at 75 reactor sites scattered across 33 states, according to the DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories. Nearly a third of that SNF—25,400 MTHM—is in dry storage in about 2,080 cask or canister systems, and the balance is in spent fuel pools, mainly at reactors, or otherwise stranded at independent spent fuel storage installations (ISFSIs) if the reactor has been shut down.
Another 2,200 MTHM of SNF is generated nationwide each year. Because U.S. pools have reached capacity limits, about 160 new dry storage canisters are loaded each year. Sandia presents the problem starkly: If the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) grants all license renewals requested by the bulk of the nation’s 99-reactor fleet, and assuming no new reactors will be built and no action is taken on long-term disposal, the nation’s projected SNF inventory will surge unrelentingly upward (Figure 1)—and with it, risks for health, security, and the environment. As crucially, the taxpayers’ burden for the federal government’s inaction on the nuclear waste impasse is getting ever heavier. Getting the project started hasn’t been cheap: From fiscal year 1983 to the DOE’s license submittal for Yucca Mountain to the NRC in 2008, the DOE spent nearly $15 billion (in 2010 dollars) to investigate developing a repository. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says that from fiscal year 2009 to fiscal year 2016, the agency received an additional $1.4 billion in appropriations for nuclear waste management. Meanwhile, the Nuclear Waste Fund—a U.S. Treasury account collected via a fee charged to ratepayers over 30 years—today holds a balance of about $37 billion. Mostly unused, owing to paralysis of the Yucca Mountain project, it continues to accumulate interest of about $1.7 billion a year from investments in Treasury securities.
And worse, because the DOE entered into NWPA-required contracts with every U.S. nuclear generator to dispose of SNF no later than January 1998 in return for the fee, nuclear generators have recovered costs for SNF storage and management by suing the DOE. The first settlement the Department of Justice reached under such litigation in July 2000 allowed PECO Energy (now part of Exelon) to keep up to $80 million in nuclear waste fee revenues for 10 years. However, other generators sued the DOE to block the settlement, and the Eleventh Circuit ultimately ruled in September 2002 that compensation for missing the disposal deadline would have to come from general revenues other than the Nuclear Waste Fund. Those nuclear waste payments now come out of the Treasury’s Judgement Fund (see sidebar: “The Judgement Fund: The Taxpayers’ Nuclear Waste Burden”), a permanent account that requires no appropriations and is used to cover damage claims against the U.S. government.
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