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Utilities Seek to Halt Nuclear Waste Fee

The New York Times By Matthew L. Wald July 11, 2009, 8:02 amUtilities Seek to Halt Nuclear Waste Fee

The nuclear industry is contemplating something akin to a rent strike.

Since the early 1980s, utilities have been paying the Energy Department a fee of one tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour generated in reactors, to pay for a nuclear waste repository. In exchange for the payments, the department signed contracts promising to take the wastes beginning in 1997……………………

Now the power-generation industry wants to stop paying the fee — which would amount to about $769 million for 2009. Some $29.6 billion has already been paid though the end of last year, according to a Bloomberg report.

The law requires the energy secretary to determine every year the “adequacy” of the fee, the industry’s trade group, the Nuclear Energy Institute, pointed out in a letter on Thursday.

It is now well beyond adequate, according to utilities, since the government is spending very little money on the project.

Power companies have already won court decisions that allow them to collect damages, now likely to run well over $20 billion, from the federal government, for their extra costs — including building temporary steel-and-concrete silos, in which old fuel can be stored for decades.

(The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is also preparing to vote on a new policy for waste that would consider such storage adequate for the next few decades, and would permit new reactors to be built even without a long-term plan for waste disposal.)…………………………..“There is no clearly defined program for disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste,’’ wrote Frederick Butler, the president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners

Utilities Seek to Halt Nuclear Waste Fee – Green Inc. Blog – NYTimes.com

July 11, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs