Inaction more costly than action on nuclear waste
Tuesday, August 19, 2008 12:42 AM PDT
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E-mail this articleAug. 19 Daily News editorial
Opponents of plans to build a nuclear waste dump near Yucca Mountain in Nevada know that time and inflation are their allies. Led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority has starved the project of adequate funding, pushing back the completion date by years and adding billions of dollars to project costs.
The strategy is designed to slow work on the waste dump to a crawl and allow sticker shock to do the rest. It appears to be working. The U.S. Energy Department recently issued a revised cost estimate of $96.2 billion — $38.7 billion more than was projected in 2001.
Much of that increase is due to new estimates on how much nuclear waste the facility will have to store. The Energy Department says a bigger, more expensive repository will have to constructed. The original plan was to build a repository capable of storing 77,000 tons of waste. But commercial reactors have continued to produce waste at the rate of 2,000 tons a year, and it’s now thought that the dump will have to be expanded to accommodate as much as 122,000 tons of radioactive waste. Inflation accounts for $16 billion of the new cost estimate. Significantly, the estimate does not account for inflation between now and the estimated project completion date of 2020.
The architects of this delaying strategy are driven by local political pressures. Nevada citizens don’t want the waste dump in their back yard, and Nevada politicians have battled on behalf of their constituents from the start. With the Democrats’ takeover of Congress in 2006 and Reid’s rise to the top Senate post, local politics have become a national, partisan issue. Democratic opposition to the project is nearly complete; even the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, has become an outspoken opponent.
Whatever short-term political gains blocking the construction of the waste dump might deliver would be far out-weighed by the strategic, economic and policy consequences of failing to complete the project.
Tens of thousands of tons of commercial nuclear waste — including 4,700 tons of spent fuel rods currently stored at the idled Trojan Nuclear Plant near Rainier — are scattered around the country at 131 sites. Strategically, it’s important that this radioactive waste be shipped to one central, secure site. Economically, walking away from the Yucca Mountain project would be very costly. The federal government is contractually obligated to take possession of this waste. Reneging on that obligation would leave the government liable to commercial utilities for at least $60 billion in damages, according to most estimates. Additionally, failing to take possession of this commercial waste would pretty well rule out an energy policy that included expanded use of nuclear power.
Ward Sproat, the Energy Department official in charge of the nuclear waste program, correctly takes exception with those who claim proceeding with the project would be too costly. The cost is significant, Sproat conceded in an interview with Associated Press writer H. Josef Hebert. “But you have to say compared to what. ... The cost of doing nothing is a lot higher.” He’s right.
BMused wrote on Aug 19, 2008 11:17 AM:
The disposal site is in Nye County, some 90 mi. from Las Vegas. Nye County Board of Commissioners is on record supporting the proposed facility, provided it is found to be safe. Many residents in the county are not opposed.
Where the opposition is strongest is in, shall we say, the business community in Las Vegas. Their contention is that the dominent economic engine of the city and thus the state, is tourism/entertainment which is discretionary and could be scared off from visiting Vegas if there were a nuclear waste disposal facility nearby. The local governments there have made much of the perceived risk of a transportation accident that might be termed "fear-mongering" or, at least, presents a worst case scenario that is not supported by facts.
You are right that Sen. Harry Reid has been effective at financially impeding the repository project, as if a solid majority of both houses of Congress did not approve the Yucca Mountain site in 2002. It seems that no senator in his party is motivated to challenge their leader. As far as many in Congress see it-- notwithstanding the liability for damages to nuclear utilities-- the status quo seems to be working too well. "
TDN Bad Boy wrote on Aug 19, 2008 2:00 PM:
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