“We should build a nuclear waste dump in Nevada now because ratepayers have paid for it”
Wrong again
While it is true that ratepayers have contributed billions of dollars into the Nuclear Waste Fund, this fund is intended for use in the construction of a permanent repository for high-level waste. Should the fund prove inadequate, taxpayers, not the nuclear utilities, will be left holding thebag.
An Overburdened Fund
The Nuclear Waste Fund is likely incapable of covering the costs of a repository. Never indexed to inflation, the waste fund fee has lost 45 percent of its value since 1982. As a result, the General Accounting Office has found that the waste fund may prove insufficient to fund the full repository program, while an independent financial review commissioned by the Department of Energy and the State of Nevada projected a funding shortfall of $4 billion to $8 billion. In other words, the billions of dollars of which the industry speaks have already been more than spoken for.
So, How does S. 104 help alleviate this funding shortfall?
S. 104 adds interim storage construction and operation costs to be paid from the waste fund.
S. 104 caps the fee at its current tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour.
S. 104 prevents the fund from accumulating surpluses after 2002. These surpluses will be needed to pay for the program after operating nuclear reactors close. Without a surplus in the waste fund, taxpayers will lack any protection.
In a recent report that denied the need for centralized interim storage at this time, the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, the nonpartisan oversight body for the Department of Energy’s high-level waste program, reaffirmed the principle that nuclear power’s beneficiaries, not taxpayers, should shoulder the costs of interim storage.
“Given current funding projections, it appears that the Nuclear Waste Fund will only be marginally capable, at best, of supporting the long-term development and operation of a repository for the permanent disposal of spent fuel,” the report notes. “The costs of a large storage facility…could be recovered by increasing the current 1 mill-per-kwh fee going into the Nuclear Waste Fund. This would avoid having the taxpayer bear the costs of final closure of the repository.”
Who Pays?
S. 104 shifts title to and liability for high-level waste from the utilities that chose to create it to taxpayers beginning in 1999. In the absence of a long-term plan for the disposition of these materials, which will remain highly toxic for up to a quarter million years, the risks to the taxpayer are extensive and open-ended.
Now the industry would have Congress shift interim storage costs to the overburdened fund and the taxpayer, costs that current law places upon the owners and generators of high-level waste.
You Can’t Balance the Budget with Billion Dollar Radioactive Bailouts
For more information contact Bill Magavern or Auke Piersma at 546-4996.
Auke Piersma Phone: (202) 546-4996
Researcher/Admin Assist Fax: (202) 547-7392
Critical Mass Energy Project Email: apiersma@citizen.org
Public Citizen Website: www.citizen.org/