In the previous post, I talked about the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. On December 12, 2011 before the release of its final report, the BRC sent a letter Secretary of Energy and President Obama.
One of the things that the letter emphasizes is that the President should move as soon as possible to makes changes with the Nuclear Waste Fund collected as fees on nuclear utilities. The letter says that the Commission learned in its investigation of the NWF that the fund is not working as intended. They charge that actions by the Executive Branch and Congress have made the twenty seven billion dollars in the NWF unavailable for the current nuclear waste management program. The intent of the creation of the NWF was to reserve money for nuclear waste management and keep it out of the annual budget fight for funding that most Federal programs are subjected to. Without access to the NWF, nuclear waste management now does have to fight for a share of the Federal budget to do its work.
Under the current contract, the government is collecting seven hundred fifty million per year from nuclear utilities. Since the passing of the deadline for a U.S. nuclear waste repository in 1998 to take spent nuclear fuel, utilities have successfully sued the U.S. government for violation of contract and government liabilities may climb to sixteen billion dollars under the present contract.
The Commission letter suggests that the President move to amend the standard nuclear waste contract with nuclear utilities so that the utilities are only required to pay a fee to cover the current temporary storage of spent nuclear fuels. At the same time, Congress should change the budgetary treatment of the fees collected from nuclear utilities to divert them from a permanent disposal solution to temporary disposal management. The Commission requests that these actions be undertaken for the Fiscal Year 2013 budget proposal.
The Commission recognizes that there would be an impact on the national deficit because the current seven hundred fifty million dollars being collected is used to decrease the annual deficit. On the other hand, the Commission points out that the mounting costs of fines and litigations from utility lawsuits are increasing the deficit. If these changes are made to the NWF, then current nuclear waste management could be reliably funded and the lawsuits from nuclear utilities would end.
The Commission letter mentions that it worked with both advocates for the taxpayers concerned about the permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel and the industry associations that are advocating for expanding nuclear. Both of these groups support the recommendations outlined in the letter and detailed in the final report from the Commission delivered on January 26, 2012. Even though the report lacked specifics for dealing with permanent spent nuclear waste disposal, the recommendations in the report and the letter are an important first step.
Spent nuclear fuel cask on a railcar:
