Letter: Use nuke waste fund properly

Thursday, June 28, 2001 | 8:36 a.m.

I am commenting on your June 24 editorial regarding possible changes in the way the federal budget would support the geologic repository program:

Setting aside the shots you take at the delays in program progress since 1982, some of which were caused by Nevada opposition and more due to Congress cutting the budget each year, there is a budget problem that Congress needs to address if Yucca Mountain is selected for the repository and is licensed for construction and use.

What is happening is electricity ratepayers in states where nuclear power is produced are paying (via the nuclear utilities) about $800 million per year to the U.S. Treasury to an account called the Nuclear Waste Fund. Because Congress only appropriates a fraction of that amount each year, there is a growing "balance" which earns interest even more than fees collected last year. It is a bit of a mystery whether that $10 billion balance will be available to support the program or whether the amount appropriated each year will ever equal the amount collected plus the interest if the repository is to be built and spent nuclear fuel shipped to it.

What Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham was addressing in the discussion of taking the Nuclear Waste Fund "off-budget" is not to remove the repository program from congressional oversight and public accountability, but to simply allow the fees collected from ratepayers to be used for the purpose the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 intended. There is no shortage of oversight on the radioactive waste management program. That is the way it should be.

BRIAN O' CONNELL

Editor's note: The writer is director of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners' Nuclear Waste Program Office, which is located in Washington, D.C.