nuclear-news

Time to move nuclear wastes to dry cask storage

 as the second anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in Japan draws near, some members of Congress say it is time to reduce the risk posed by spent fuel by moving some of it to dry casks.

Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, will take over as the committee’s chairmanwhen Congress begins its new session next month. In an interview on Monday, he pointed out that the department collects about $750 million a year in waste disposal fees at the rate of one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour generated by the reactors that feed those utilities. Yet the government is spending nearly nothing, he noted……

Mr. Wyden said the committee would have to take a broad look at the issue of the Energy Department’s nuclear waste fund. “The utilities are obviously unhappy they’re paying the money,’’ which is being “hijacked” for other purposes, he said — namely, deficit reduction. The fund now has a balance of $25 billion. “There is a lot of frustration” about the money and the lack of progress, he said.

Collecting money at the same rate at which it is being spent has precedents. “That is how the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is funded,” Mr. Wyden pointed out. Most of the commission’s budget comes from licensing fees.

The electric power industry has been pressing for cuts in the fees, as have some state officials who regulate the utilities. Whether Congress will go along is not clear, but every part of the nuclear waste question is now on the table.

The waste disposal fees were enshrined as law in the 1980s and are the last surviving element of a three-decade-old national consensus that the Energy Department should evaluate candidate sites, pick the best one and build a repository for nuclear wastes there. (Congress eventually told the department not to bother looking beyond Yucca Mountain — an idea that seemed to meet with the approval of everybody outside Nevada for a long while.)

A blue-ribbon commission that President Obama appointed after shelving the Yucca Mountain plan recommended starting over and searching for a new site in a process based on the host state’s consent, as opposed to forcing a repository on an unwilling Nevada.

That implies that a permanent repository is many years into the future, possibly beyond the lifetimes of many of the reactors now operating. Dominion said in October that it would close its Kewaunee nuclear plant in Wisconsin. And with the current glut of natural gas, more closings seem possible, which means leaving the wastes behind — “stranded,” as Mr. Wyden put it — at the sites of defunct reactors.

Meanwhile, as the second anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in Japan draws near, some members of Congress say it is time to reduce the risk posed by spent fuel by moving some of it to dry casks.

Alison Macfarlane, who took over as chairwoman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in June, expressed support for that step before assuming her post but has not pressed it lately. Mr. Wyden proposes examining the reactors on a case-by-case basis, focusing on those with a boiling water design of the type used at Fukushima, to consider which ones should have their spent fuel pools partly emptied.http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/come-january-another-try-on-nuclear-waste/?smid=fb-share

January 14, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, wastes