Thursday, Nov. 29, 2001 | 8:44 a.m.
A Nevada think tank is urging a free market solution to dispose of the nation's nuclear waste.
The Nevada Policy Research Institute, based in Las Vegas, has offered an alternative to burying spent reactor fuel 1,000 feet beneath Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, NPRI editorial Director Steven Miller said.
"Some call us conservative, some call us Libertarian, but basically we finally rolled up our sleeves and looked at an alternative," Miller said.
The 15-page study notes that although utilities worldwide are privatizing and deregulating, Washington's "monolithic, bureaucrat-run and failure-ridden" Yucca Mountain Project plods along.
"Two decades of experience have shown that the federal government is completely incapable of solving the used-nuclear-fuel problem," the study says.
As an alternative to transporting spent fuel rods to Yucca Mountain, the study's authors urge utilities to store the existing 44,000 tons of waste on the respective sites until the toxicity can be reduced and the remainder recycled.
"Two decades ago the federal government decided that the best way to deal with used nuclear fuel is to shove it beneath a mountain in Southern Nevada," NPRI Chairman Ranson Webster said. "We believe that was a fundamentally flawed decision, one that fails to recognize the value such material has in the growing -- and global -- nuclear industry."
The institute's study urges policymakers, the nuclear power industry and the public to stop seeing spent fuel as "waste," study author D. Dowd Moska said.
"The Yucca Mountain repository is an attempt to fix, through the political process, what is essentially an economic problem," Moska said. "That kind of approach almost never works, and it's failing spectacularly in the Southern Nevada desert."
The DOE has studied Yucca Mountain for almost 20 years, but the site has not been approved by the president, Congress or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A repository is expected to open by 2010 at the earliest. The NRC has approved dry-cask storage of the spent fuel at reactor sites for as long as 100 years.
Under current law, the free market approach suggested by the study is impossible, said Joe Strolin, socio-economic administrator for the state Agency for Nuclear Projects.
The approach may work, however, if Congress changed the law, Strolin said.
'It's kind of interesting," he said, noting that the state, which opposes a Yucca Mountain repository, has for years urged the DOE to look at alternatives. "Personally, this approach certainly makes sense to me."
The current nuclear waste fund could pay for the free market program if an $11 billion balance was turned over to nuclear utilities to deal with the spent fuel, the study concludes. The DOE has spent more than $7 billion studying Yucca Mountain since 1982.
Congress could appoint a commission to develop a process for disbursing the nuclear waste fund, the study says. If more money is needed, it can be raised by auctioning off the DOE's nonweapons research facilities. That way, the burden is shifted away from the American taxpayers, the study says.
Not all nuclear experts support the institute's alternative, however.
The Nuclear Control Institute in Washington favors burying the spent fuel.
"We do not favor leaving all waste-disposal decisions up to utilities because we oppose reprocessing and plutonium recycling," said Steven Dolley, NCI research director. "These options should be completely foreclosed."
NCI physicist Edwin Lyman said the study's focus on costs has to be considered in any solution, but it will be social and political factors that decide whether Yucca Mountain will become the nation's nuclear waste repository.
The DOE's estimates of building and operating a repository jumped from $30 billion in the mid 1990s to $56 billion last year. Those costs could increase if the DOE has to tighten security at Yucca Mountain. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing its security regulations at licensed facilities, such as reactors. If Yucca Mountain is approved as a repository, it would be regulated by the NRC.
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