Letter: On-site storage of nuclear waste not a sound solution

Thursday, July 29, 2004 | 9:15 a.m.

Your July 20 editorial "Double-talk on Yucca," asks, in view of the proposal to expand on-site storage at the Indian Point nuclear power plant in New York, "Why is Yucca Mountain such an urgent national priority?'

Disposal of high-level radioactive waste, including spent nuclear fuel from commercial power plants, in a suitable underground repository has been national policy since 1983. What makes it urgent is that the same law also said disposal was to begin in 1998. The Energy Department, which manages the disposal program, entered into contracts with nuclear utilities obligating the government to accept the waste in accordance with that schedule. In return, the utilities (and their ratepayers) began fee payments for the disposal, which they continue to pay to this day. The federal courts have found the government to be in partial breach of its contracts to accept the waste and therefore the government is liable for the costs of delay.

I don't believe you will find anyone at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or with a nuclear utility who will say that temporary storage of spent fuel at reactor sites is unsafe. There are strictly enforced NRC regulations to assure that any such storage is safe for the period of the license issued before it is built. The license is for 20 years. Construction and operation of these storage facilities only became necessary when it became apparent that the Energy Department was not going to be able to meet the 1998 waste acceptance schedule.

If you go back to the Yucca Mountain environmental impact statement you will see that building and maintaining the repository at Yucca Mountain will cost about $57 billion for a 10,000-year period. To meet the current regulatory requirements for the same period of time, while storing the waste at 77 government and commercial sites, would cost on the order of $5 trillion. Many opponents of the repository don't want to acknowledge that on-site storage at present sites is not a wise economic or environmental solution to the problem, which may be what Congress thought it was settling when it passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982.

BRIAN O' CONNELL Editor's note: Based in Washington, D.C., Brian O'Connell directs the Nuclear Waste Program Office of the National Association of Regulatory Commissioners.