No amount of money is worth turning Wyoming into a nuclear waste dump

Wyoming needs legislators willing to protect public health and seek viable economic development.

WyoFile, by Kerry Drake, August 13, 2024

Last year Steinborn, a Democrat, led a successful effort to ban the transportation and storage of high-level nuclear waste in his home state. It would take a GOP version of the legislator to accomplish that in deep-red Wyoming.

One of Steinborn’s main arguments for the ban was economic. He didn’t buy the claims of a private company that planned to build a temporary storage facility for spent nuclear fuel rods near Carlsbad, N.M. Backers had visions of billions of dollars dancing in their heads.

It’s the same dream some Wyoming legislators have embraced — fortunately without success — since the early 1990s. Now the idea has reared its ugly head again.

Rep. Donald Burkhart Jr. (R-Rawlins) said he will bring a draft bill to October’s Joint Minerals, Business and Economic Development Committee to allow a private nuclear waste dump (my description, not his) to be built in Wyoming.

Burkhart, who co-chairs the panel, said the state could reap more than $4 billion a year from nuclear waste storage “just to let us keep it here in Wyoming.” What a sweet deal!

Except the prospect of that much annual revenue may be a tad overstated. It could be about $3.974 billion less than Burkhart suggested, which means the trial balloon he floated won’t get off the ground.

How much money Wyoming could earn for hosting a nuclear waste storage facility is debated whenever the state has a budget crunch and legislators decide it’s time to reap the windfall.

I naively thought whether to establish a temporary “Monitored Retrievable Storage,” as they used to be called, had long been settled in Wyoming

In 1992, then-Gov. Mike Sullivan rejected a proposed Fremont County project. Two years later, a University of Wyoming survey found 80% of respondents opposed a high-level nuclear waste facility……………………………………………………………..

In 2019, the Legislative Management Committee narrowly decided — in a secret vote by email — to authorize a Spent Fuel Rods Subcommittee to study the issue. The panel’s chair, Sen. Jim Anderson (R-Casper), said it could be an annual $1 billion bonanza, which certainly captured people’s attention.

The subcommittee’s enthusiasm for such a project sank, though, when it learned the feds were only going to pony up $10 million a year. That figure has since increased, but not by much.

The Department of Energy announced in 2022 that it would make $16 million available to communities interested in learning more about “consent-based siting management of spent nuclear fuel.” Last year President Joe Biden’s administration sweetened the pot to $26 million.

We’ll have to wait until October’s Joint Minerals meeting to find out more details about Burkhart’s proposal. He circulated a rough draft of his bill to members of the committee on July 31, but declined to share it with the public or the media.

………………………………..Steinborn told Source NM the nation needs a permanent solution for storing spent nuclear fuel. “But New Mexico can’t just be the convenient sacrifice zone for the country’s contamination,” he said.

And neither should Wyoming. Yes, the U.S. Department of Energy and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates are backing a $4 billion Natrium nuclear power plant near Kemmerer, and BWXT Advanced Technologies is considering establishing a microreactor manufacturing hub. But Wyoming has no obligation to take other states’ nuclear trash.

I can see why some Wyoming legislators want to believe there are billions at the end of the nuclear dump rainbow. The federal government has collected more than $44 billion from energy customers since the 1980s, but the Nuclear Waste Fund was intended to be spent on a permanent facility. Temporary facilities, like what Burkhart proposes, don’t rake in the big bucks.

The feds have spent around $9 billion to pay interim nuke storage costs at the 80 current and former nuclear reactor sites located in 35 states, where a total of 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste is stored. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy’s Agency Finance Report estimated it will cost more than $30 billion until a permanent waste disposal option is completed.

But it’s increasingly unlikely a permanent site will ever be built………………………………..

There is a significant legal obstacle to siting a “temporary” waste site in Wyoming or anywhere else. Congress would have to amend the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which prohibits the Department of Energy from designating an interim storage site without a viable plan to establish a permanent deep-mined geologic repository — like the Yucca Mountain project, but one that could actually be approved and built.

…………………..Why in the world do Wyoming legislators who brag about their distrust of federal government — and in some cases even argue we shouldn’t take its money at all — see nothing wrong with a federal agency managing nuclear waste here? They’ve turned down an estimated $1.4 billion for Medicaid expansion since 2013, but they’re willing to take peanuts from the federal government to be a nuclear dumping ground?

……………………………. https://wyofile.com/no-amount-of-money-is-worth-turning-wyoming-into-a-nuclear-waste-dump/