Energy Secretary Sends Yucca Legislation to Congress

Some 20 years and $8.6 billion after Yucca Mountain in Nevada was first rated by the US Department of Energy as the best site in the country to permanently store tens of thousands of tons of high-level nuclear waste, the Bush administration is beginning a new push to get the languishing project moving. But the new initiative, a legislative proposal DOE Secretary Samuel Bodman sent to Congress in early April, faces a difficult time on Capitol Hill.

Even before Bodman sent the proposal, Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, said that it would be difficult to conduct a debate on the controversial Yucca Mountain program in a congressional session that is caught up in election-year politics. And although Bodman has sent the proposal to Congress, DOE officials remain reluctant to say when they will submit to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission the application to begin construction of the facility. In testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee earlier this year, DOE official Paul Golan said a “schedule” for the application’s submission to the NRC would be published “later this summer.” The application was originally intended to go to the NRC in 2004.

In a letter to the Senate and House that accompanied the legislative proposal, Bodman said the “existence of a repository at Yucca Mountain is critical to the expanded use of nuclear power.” Even with the administration’s new proposal for a global nuclear energy partnership, which focuses on recycling nuclear waste instead of storing it, Bodman said the Yucca repository “will continue to be necessary to deal with the spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste that will be generated by those [recycling] technologies.”

Currently about 55 000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste are stored at more than 100 sites in 39 states, according to DOE officials. An additional 2000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste is being generated each year.

The proposed legislation calls for several specific actions by Congress to make the development of the Yucca site possible. DOE asks that 147 000 acres of land surrounding Yucca Mountain, which is located about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, be withdrawn from public use. Possession of the land by DOE is one of the NRC requirements for granting a license to build the facility. The legislation would also repeal the 70 000-metric-ton capacity limitation for waste storage at the facility and allow the limit to “be determined by the actual physical capacity of the mountain.”

The legislation would also reclassify the Nuclear Waste Fund money paid by nuclear-power-plant operators to cover the cost of disposal of radioactive waste. The fund now contains about $15 billion, but that money, by law, cannot be used to directly pay for the development of Yucca Mountain. Instead, the Yucca project is funded by discretionary appropriations from the civilian nuclear-waste program. Freeing up the Nuclear Waste Fund money for Yucca could significantly increase funds available for the project. There are other provisions that would “simplify” the regulatory requirements related to Yucca and, according to a DOE analysis, would “eliminate lengthy, largely duplicative reviews” of the transport and storage of nuclear waste.

On another front in the push for Yucca, the US Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce in the next several months a new standard for limiting radiation exposure at the Yucca repository for a one-million-year period. The revised standard is needed since the previous standard, based on the repository’s being safe for 10 000 years, was thrown out in 2004 by the US Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia because it was not “based on and consistent with” an earlier National Academy of Sciences radiation peak-dose safety recommendation.

While Domenici is doubtful that the Yucca legislation will see any action this year, the Republican staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works delivered a report in March to committee chairman James Inhofe (R-OK) strongly urging that the Yucca project move forward. The report concluded that “the more we examine Yucca Mountain, the better it looks. There is certainly no reason in science not to move forward directly with the project.”

Yet at a hearing Inhofe held after receiving the report, Sen. Harry Reid (DNV), who has staunchly opposed the development of the waste facility in his state, testified, “I am convinced the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump will never be built because the project is mired in scientific, safety and technical problems. The … project is a failure. I have fought against Yucca Mountain for decades, and I will continue to fight it.”