On Saturday, January 31, 1998, according to contracts signed more than a decade ago, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is supposed to begin storing high-level nuclear waste for the nation’s utilities. Fortunately, it isn’t going to happen.
January 31, 1998 was arbitrarily enshrined as the deadline for the start of what will surely be rated by history as one of the biggest industrial bail-outs ever: U.S. taxpayers taking responsibility for the high-level radioactive wastes generated by commercial nuclear reactors. In the U.S., and worldwide, 95% of the radioactivity in all nuclear waste is in commercial nuclear power waste.
“The Nuclear Waste Policy Act was crafted to do something that has never been done before: isolate substances that are so hazardous that they must be contained for a quarter-million years. Congress was overly optimistic in allowing only 15 years for this feat to be accomplished,” said Mary Olson, Nuclear Waste Specialist for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS). “The 1998 deadline was arbitrary and politically motivated. Congress ignored technical experts in 1982 who said 25-30 years was more realistic for this first-of-a-kind program.”
“The 1982 Act is being misrepresented by the waste generators. They are asserting that the Nuclear Waste Fund was intended to pay for nuclear waste storage. The fund was created in 1982 to pay for permanent isolation of this deadly utility waste. Nuclear ratepayers have paid one tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour for the long term impact of the waste that was generated by their use of nuclear power,” said Olson. “The 1982 Act was very clear that the nuclear utilities are responsible for the cost of interim storage of their waste.”
Public Citizen has issued a report that estimates that the interim storage of high-level waste on reactor sites to be about $603 million dollars. However, the push by the waste generators is to move their waste offsite for storage.
The second arm of nuclear industry action was the introduction in 1995 of legislation that would be a complete substitute for the current Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. The proposed new law would authorize a temporary waste holding site, basically a parking lot for nuclear waste transport casks. The new site would be next door to Yucca Mountain, Nevada, which is under study by the DOE, but has not been approved as adequate for a permanent nuclear repository. Thirty-five earthquake fault zones and recent lava cones nearby call to question the judgment of having chosen this site as the only one to study for a repository.
Passed through both the House (HR 1270), and the Senate (S 104), the legislation is still pending a conference committee and faces a veto from the Clinton/Gore administration. Over 150 environmental, consumer and taxpayer advocacy groups oppose this legislation.
“It is ridiculous to the point of irresponsible for an arbitrary deadline to determine what we do with irradiated nuclear fuel, one of the most hazardous substances known to humankind,” said Michael Mariotte, Executive Director of NIRS. “The legislation pending in Congress does nothing to make nuclear waste policy more effective. Instead of learning from the mistakes of the 1982 Act, the bills are riddled with more arbitrary deadlines. Sound science cannot be dictated by politically-motivated deadlines. It is not only inane to repeat the same mistake of dictating schedules from Capitol Hill, in the case of shipping nuclear waste through our cities and agricultural heartland, it is downright dangerous.”
The industry legislation would require shipments of atomic waste to begin soon after the turn of the century. Deadlines in the bill would require an ambitious rate of 1500 truck shipments a year, or about as much high-level waste each year as has been moved in the last 30 years combined (use of rail would reduce the number of shipments, but not the tonnage of waste moved). The shipping campaign is projected to last 30 years or more and cut across 43 states. St. Louis, for example, could expect one shipment every eight hours for 30 years.
Average shipment distance would be about 2000 miles with a total of about 90 million miles traveled, if trucks are predominately used. The American Petroleum Institute reports that the heavy trucking industry experiences 6 accidents for every million miles traveled. Assuming that nuclear waste shipments follow the course of the industry average, one might expect as many as 540 accidents over the 30 years, giving rise to the popular name for the bill, “Mobile Chernobyl.”
“It is very clear what the nuclear utilities are up to: in the face of competition from the opening of energy markets, the goal of the nuclear waste generator’s campaign is to transfer the liability for their deadly wastes off their balance sheets and on to the taxpayer,” said Mariotte. “In trying to make the most expensive form of energy production compete, they are endangering the lives of more than 50 million people who live within 1/2 mile of the likely transport routes. It is not acceptable to settle for a temporary fix–especially one that could result in long-term storage at the only site in the nation explicitly found unsuitable for nuclear waste storage.