Berkley bill would divert nuke funds

Suzanne Struglinski

Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2005 | 11:09 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., planned to tell Congress today that money collected to pay for nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain should be used to research ways to keep the waste at nuclear power plants instead.

Berkley was to make her third attempt today to get Congress to approve diverting money from the Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for storing spent fuel at power plants longer instead of using the fund for Yucca Mountain.

Nuclear power users pay a per-kilowatt-hour fee into the Nuclear Waste Fund, an account specifically set aside to pay for the proposed repository. The fund has accumulated about $16 billion in the past two decades.

Berkley's bill would put the money toward studying how to decrease waste radiation levels, ways to increase the length of time waste can be stored at nuclear power plants and how to reduce transportation of spent fuel.

"The government shall not use any funds for research, development, or implementation of a central high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel repository," the bill text notes.

Berkley has introduced the bill twice before, but it did not go anywhere. She has higher hopes this time around because of even more expected delays on the repository.

"There are growing voices in the nuclear power industry that support looking at alternatives to burying nuclear waste 90 minutes outside Las Vegas given the insurmountable obstacles facing Yucca Mountain," Berkley said in a statement.

"With each passing day there are fewer and fewer justifications for moving forward on efforts to bury nuclear waste in Nevada when on-site storage is safe, affordable and already in use.

"Power plant operators are already investing millions of dollars to store waste and to harden areas that will be used for dry-cask storage," Berkley said in her issued statement. But Mitch Singer of Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry's lead lobbying group, said the "Nuclear Waste Fund should be used for its intended purpose which is to build Yucca Mountain. It's pretty simple for us."

But Berkley uses her longstanding argument that the country's nuclear waste will exceed the mountain's 77,000-ton statutory limit and all the waste can not be moved to the mountain at once.

"The industry does not want to discuss the fact that as long as nuclear power is being produced, some amount of nuclear waste will always remain at the plants where it was generated," Berkley said.