Clinton Administration Won’t Appeal Nuke Waste Court Ruling

Wednesday, Oct. 23, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

The Energy Department said Tuesday it would not challenge an appeals court ruling last July that directed the department beginning in 1998 to accept spent nuclear fuel now stored at commercial reactors in 34 states.

Assistant Energy Secretary Thomas Grumbly acknowledged that at this time the government can't say where it will put the used reactor fuel. He said he hoped that by 1998 a decision would be made on whether a permanent repository in Nevada is suitable for the material.

"Physically we can't take the waste," said Grumbly.

Even if the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada is found technically acceptable for underground storage of the estimated 30,000 tons of highly radioactive used fuel now at reactors, that facility is not expected to be completed until 2010 at the earliest.

The administration has opposed efforts in Congress to built a temporary storage site in Nevada, arguing such a decision could jeopardize efforts to find a permanent repository for the fuel, which will remain highly radioactive for hundreds of years.

In a statement Tuesday, the Energy Department said it would not appeal the July court decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. "The department is reviewing its options as to what further steps may be taken," said the statement.

Grumbly said the administration and the Congress is "going to have to step up and deal with the nuclear waste issue ... (and) not put it on the back burner."

In response to a lawsuit filed by nuclear plant operators and some state regulators, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last July that the government is obligated under a 1982 law to take the highly radioactive spent fuel now at reactor sites and store it at a centralized location beginning at least by Jan. 31, 1998.

If it fails to do so, the government will be in violation of its contractual agreement with the electric utilities, the court said, although it did not propose how the government would accept the fuel if it had no storage site.

"We think the best option is (for the department) to go back to Congress next year with legislation giving DOE authorization for a federal interim storage facility," said Steven Unglesbee, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group.

He said that if the Energy Department government fails to provide a storage facility in 1998 another lawsuit likely will be filed asking that the government be found in breach of its contract and penalized. "That's when the court has to get involved again," he added.

It was unclear how the department intended to comply with the court directive since a decision on the suitability of the proposed site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada will not even be made until 1998.

It has been suggested by some members of Congress, including Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, that federal facilities such as the Savannah nuclear weapons site in South Carolina or the Hanford site in Washington state might be used for temporary storage.

Grumbly said right now there are no such plans to use federal facilities, however.

The disposal of as much as 30,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel that has been building up at more than 100 nuclear reactors in 34 states is expected to become one of the key environmental issues in the next Congress.

The nuclear industry has been clamoring for government relief, arguing that the industry was promised years ago that the Energy Department would take over disposal of the wastes, which remain radioactive for hundreds of years.

Spent civilian nuclear fuel is kept in water storage pools at reactor sites or, in a small number of cases, in dry casks above ground. The industry argued in its lawsuit that it is running out of local storage space and already is contributing millions of dollars into a special fund that is supposed to pay for building a centralized storage facility.