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May 17, 2006
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Proposals Could Let Nuclear Wastes in Utah
WASHINGTON — Utah could see a few forms of nuclear waste come to the state if plans discussed at a Senate hearing Tuesday move ahead. Approval of a federal interim storage facility for commercial nuclear fuel could move fuel rods to the Private Fuel Storage site on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation — and a plan to recycle nuclear waste could make additional waste eligible to be stored at EnergySolutions' facilities. Neither idea has been approved nor given money to proceed just yet, but Congress has options to make either proposal work. At a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing Tuesday, Paul Golan, the government's top Yucca Mountain official, said "the department continues to have an open mind on interim storage." He said the department does not believe it has the authority under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 — the law that guides the government's plan to store nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas — to move ahead with interim storage, but if Congress allowed it, the department would be open to the discussion. "Interim storage is less important than moving Yucca Mountain forward, but we understand that the commercial utilities are running in to a storage situation." Golan said. Storage problems are what led several utilities to develop plans to make their own interim facility known as Private Fuel Storage (PFS) in Tooele County. Yucca was supposed to open in 1998, but legal, technical and financial problems have delayed it year after year. PFS is looking for interested utilities to help construct the site now that it has its license approved. It also still needs approval from the Bureau of Land Management to build a transfer facility for waste brought in by truck. Utah's congressional delegation blocked a potential railroad on public land by including the starting point in a Wilderness Area designed to protect the Utah Test and Training Range. The department is supposed to release a new schedule for Yucca in the summer, Golan said. That will give utilities an estimated opening date so they will know how much longer they will have to store waste at the nuclear power plants — or look at other options. Golan would not name a specific location on where an interim site would go. "That's a question that I think will involve a public dialogue," Golan said. If Congress approved interim storage, PFS would not instantly become the interim storage site. But because it has a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to store commercial spent fuel, it could be an attractive location — even with the transportation obstacles it faces. "As it is the only licensed facility in the nation, it creates the very real possibility that high-level waste could be sent to Utah," said Vanessa Pierce, program director at the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah. PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin said if the federal government wanted to become a customer and move waste to the site, "we are willing." Chairman John Parkyn sent a letter to Congress earlier this year outlining that option, but the consortium has received no formal response, she said. "We are a strong supporter of a change to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act that would allow interim storage," she said, although she was not sure what the recent discussion on interim storage means for PFS. The House Energy and Water Development spending bill, which includes the Yucca budget, contains $30 million for an interim storage site if Congress allowed the department to create one. The bill is before the House Appropriations Committee today and then will await a floor vote. Congress could create the interim option as part of a multipart Yucca Mountain bill created by the administration that would affect the project in a number of ways if passed. At Tuesday's hearing, Committee Chairman Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who introduced the Senate's version of the bill, said it does not address interim storage and said he would work to find "common ground to answer the spent fuel question." Domenici has been a champion of interim storage in the past, even writing in a book he wrote on nuclear power in 2004 that he would revive a push for interim storage. He said nuclear waste could stay at nuclear power plants for decades longer, because the country "will need a completely different Yucca Mountain" to store waste generated from reprocessing rather than as it is today. "We are not going to be putting spent fuel rods in Yucca Mountain," he said. Domenici, who is also the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee that writes the Senate's version of the energy spending bill, said he will fully fund the administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership and "look for more" dollars to support the reprocessing proposal, nicknamed GNEP. The administration asked for $250 million for the effort, but the House spending bill only includes $150 million for it. "We've got to recycle," he said. The administration has stressed that a reprocessing plan would not eliminate the need for Yucca but could change what is put in there. But Pierce said "reprocessing only repackages nuclear waste, it doesn't eliminate nuclear waste." She said a federal reprocessing plan could create waste that could be put in EnergySolutions' facilities, although the exact type and classification of it is still debatable. "No one wants to be honest about what a boondoggle reprocessing is," she said. E-mail: suzanne@desnews.com © 2006 Deseret News Publishing Company http://deseretnews.com/dn/print/1,1442,635208096,00.html
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