Outgoing Yucca director sees budget as top priority

Suzanne Struglinski

Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2005 | 9:53 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department's outgoing Yucca Mountain project chief is confident the nuclear waste repository will open, but she said Congress has to allocate enough money first.

When Margaret Chu, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, resigned Friday, her farewell e-mail to employees included a line about her confidence that used nuclear fuel will be put inside Yucca, she told the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners conference on Monday. She said this was not just a line, but her true feeling.

"It has to succeed," Chu told the commissioners. "I think this organization has made a lot of progress in the past few years."

Chu said she considers putting John Arthur as Yucca Mountain project deputy director and creating a more organized management team her "legacy."

"I can say that with a straight face," she said. "The operations are better."

She said she had two goals when taking on her position, to create a stronger organization and hand in the project's license application.

A federal court ruling last year that threw out a Environmental Protection Agency radiation standard and regulatory and budget problems made the Energy Department miss the deadline to file an application for a construction license, but she said she did not have much control over that. The department plans to submit a license application for the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, by the end of this year.

Chu said if the Environmental Protection Agency establishes a new standard quickly, it will not affect the program much, but if the agency takes a long time to set a new standard it will push it farther off track. She expects the repository will not open until 2012, rather than 2010 as the department had planned for decades.

Chu expects to stay through Feb. 25 before returning to New Mexico, but she said she has no plans on what she will do next. She had been planning to leave for six months and she said most people knew she had planned to stay for only one term. She said she was, overall, quite pleased with her time heading up the program.

"It's a daunting, difficult program," Chu said.

The biggest obstacle the project still faces is the budget, she said.

"It takes a lot of money to build and operate a nuclear repository," Chu said.

She believes Congress will eventually pass a change to budget rules that would allow fees paid for nuclear power users for the repository to go directly toward the program without affecting other federal programs. Under current rules, lawmakers who want to fund Yucca have to take money away from other projects in the energy and water spending bill.

Chu said it does not take a lot of explanation to Congress for why it should change the rules and it will only be a matter of time before it is done, although she would want to see it ready for the fiscal year 2007 budget.

Meanwhile, the state utility commissioners for the last two days have been discussing their frustration with nuclear power users paying for a repository they have yet to see, while nuclear companies have to pay to store used fuel at their nuclear power plants.

The department was supposed to take the waste in 1998. Congress has shortchanged the project $1 billion below the department's requests over the past decade while $16 billion sits in the fund waiting to be spent.

Don Keskey, an attorney with Michigan law firm Clark Hill, said state regulators should create separate accounts for ratepayer money owed to the fund and hold onto it rather than sending it to Washington.

But Jay Silberg, an attorney with Washington, D.C., law firm Shaw Pittman, advised against opening separate accounts because it could violate a contract created under federal law with the department and put a nuclear power plant's operating license on the line.

Another option, discussed Sunday, was to pull the Yucca project from the department completely and create a separate government corporation tasked solely with building the repository.