Nuclear mattersObama's budget cuts off most funds for Yucca Mountain repository

President Obama’s proposed budget cuts off most money for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project. The decision fulfills a campaign promise, wins the president political points in Nevada, a state which has become more Democratic in the past decade, and demonstrates the political muscle of Harry Reid (D-Nevada), the Senate majority leader. It also raises new questions about what to do with radioactive waste from the U.S. nuclear power plants.

The New York Times’s Matthew Wald writes that the decision could cost the federal government additional billions in payments to the utility industry, and if it holds up, it would mean that most of the $10.4 billion alredy spent since 1983 to find a place to put nuclear waste was wasted.

A decision to abandon the Yucca Mountain repository would leave the United States with no solution to a problem it has struggled with for half a century. The decision will also complicate the revival of the nuclear power industry. The last nuclear power reactor in the United States was built nearly three decades ago, but the rising price of oil and concerns about global warming have prompted renewed interest in nuclear power generation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has already received about two dozen applications from utility companies for licenses to build new reactors.

Lawyers say that utilities, which now must pay to store their wastes instead of having the government bury them, will sue the government for tens of billions of dollars in damages, with the figure rising by about a half-billion dollars for each year of additional delay. The federal government is already paying dearly for decade-long delays in the Yucca Mountian project: the courts have awarded the companies about $1 billion because the government signed contracts obligating it to begin taking the waste in 1998. Now it appears it will be years before the government can do so. The nuclear industry says it may demand the return of the $22 billion that it has paid to the Energy Department to establish a repository, but which the government has not yet spent.

Wald writes that the spent fuel and contaminated gear — both resulting from the nuclear power generation process — have been accumulating for decades in steel-lined pools or giant steel-and-concrete casks near the reactors. Yucca Mountain, a ridge of volcanic rock about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, has been the leading candidate site for a repository since the 1980s. It was not, however, selected by any scientific process of elimination; it was selected from a list in 1987 by Congress, which declared it dry and remote enough.

Scientific concerns have since emerged, including the realization that water flows through Yucca Mountain much faster than initially believed. This raises the prospect that the nuclear waste would leach over time, polluting the water table. The scientific merit of the site has not been established by independent judges.

Wald writes that the political wind is blowing so strongly against using Yucca Mountain, that the nuclear industry’s trade association is not opposing Obama head-on. Instead, in response to his budget proposal, it called for creation of an independent panel to study how the government should meet its “legal and moral obligation” to take the waste. Obama himself is calling for more study.

Reid does not appear to have the votes to kill the Yucca Mountain depository entirely, because many members of Congress want to stick with the consensus they achieved two decades ago to bury the waste there. If Congress changes the law that designates Yucca Mountain as the prime candidate, said Edward Sproat III, who was the Energy Department official in charge of the depository project for the last two and a half years of the Bush administration, “everybody knows their state is going to be back in play.”

The site’s suitability is supposed to be established in hearings by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must decide whether to license the repository. Now, the Obama administration is proposing to provide only enough money that project officials can answer questions from the hearings. Eliot Brenner, a commission spokesman, said the hearings would proceed. “What happens once we say yes or no is out of our hands,” Brenner said.

Wald notes that opponents of nuclear power contend that the U.S. failure to find a permanent repository for the waste is a reason to shut down nuclear reactors and forget about building more. Abandonment of the Yucca Mountain depository would be a blow for the nuclear industry, which is hoping to begin work on new reactors for the first time in thirty years. If the commission does not issue its decision until the next administration, that could keep Yucca Mountain viable.