True costs of nuclear-generated electricity hidden for decades

US nuclear industry’s plan thanks to NRC: let taxpayers carry the can for closed power plants, Ecologist Linda Pentz Gunter13th May 2016 “…….Using Vermont Yankee (a relatively small 620 MWe reactor) as an example, the decommissioning cost estimate in 2015 was $1.2 billion and rising. At the same time, Entergy, the plant’s owner, had just $625 million on hand.

In early May, Entergy was reprimanded (but not fined) by the NRC for violating “federal regulations last year when it prematurely took money out of the Vermont Yankee decommissioning trust fund to cover planning expenses associated with the handling of spent nuclear fuel at the closed reactor”, the Times Argus reported.

Another factor in the current struggle to pay for decommissioning is rooted in a decades-long practice by utilities of omitting the costs of decommissioning from electricity bills in order to artificially lower rates and stay competitive in the market.

Rather than preserve decommissioning trust funds for actual decommissioning work, utilities are now asking the NRC to let them raid the funds for activities outside the parameters of the reactor decommissioning process. These activities include the payment of taxes and the protracted management of orphaned nuclear waste left on site.

In addition, while at the same time delaying the start of decommissioning, the utilities have requested and received exemptions from the NRC that allow them to eliminate radiological emergency planning and drastically reduce on-site security around hundreds of tons high-level nuclear waste, all in the name of saving money.

“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission appears to be complicit in this process and is in fact providing a significant hidden subsidy to the nuclear industry when it looks the other way by allowing public trust funds to be raided in violation of the Code of Federal Regulations”, writes Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates in a document submitted to the NRC.

Gundersen, along with other groups including my own – Beyond Nuclear – have filed comments to the NRC as part of an arcane and convoluted process known as an ‘Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Decommissioning.’ The public comment period closed on March 18, 2016.

A years long Rulemaking is underway because reactor owners are asking to streamline what were site-specific exemptions and have them issued generically instead, and across the board, without any opportunity for public review or comment. This essentially eliminates public transparency in the decommissioning process.

It further seeks to save the corporation from spending any of its electricity production profits on the costs of safety and security oversight the companies claim are no longer needed once the reactor stops power production and is defueled………..http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2987679/us_nuclear_industrys_plan_thanks_to_nrc_let_taxpayers_carry_the_can_for_closed_power_plants.html