On Friday, the Department of Energy stopped collecting a fee from the customers of nuclear power plants to fund a stalled spent fuel repository project.
Established by legislation in 1982, the charge of one tenth of a cent for every kilowatt-hour of nuclear power had been used to fund development of the long-delayed disposal facility in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. When the Obama administration halted that project in 2010, the Nuclear Energy Institute and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners sued. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the DOE had no grounds to collect $750 million annually in waste fees unless the Yucca Mountain project restarted or Congress passed an alternative disposal plan.
In a release, NEI CEO Marvin Fertel said, “Given that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act remains in effect, Congress should provide sufficient funds to the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to complete the licensing process for the Yucca Mountain repository.”
The Nevada facility was supposed to begin accepting waste in 1998 but faced ardent political opposition in the state and technical challenges associated with designing a repository to safely entomb the waste for thousands of years. In the meantime, spent fuel has accumulated in dry casks at nuclear plants across the country. In separate lawsuits, plant owners have successfully recovered the cost to store the material that would have been shipped to the repository, which represents a liability for the U.S. government totaling an estimated $20 billion by 2020.