In 1982, The U.S. Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Included in the Policy Act was the provision that the U.S. utilities would pay a tax on the radioactive waste being generated by the U.S. utility companies operating nuclear reactors. The money in the fund was to be used by the U.S. government to create a safe permanent disposal facility by 1998. The Yucca Mountain Repository was the intended solution to permanent disposal. The Yucca Mountain Project ran behind schedule and encountered environmental concerns and public backlash in Nevada. In 2010, the Obama administration moved to cancel the Yucca Mountain Project. There has been opposition to cancelling the project. A federal court is going to rule on the effort to cancel by the end of 2012. At this point, there is no plan in the U.S. for permanent nuclear waste disposal.
The fund receives about seven hundred fifty million dollars a year and now contains twenty seven billion of dollars collected from the utility companies. The fund is restricted to only be used on a permanent disposal solution. It cannot be used on an interim solution such as enclosing the spent nuclear fuel in steel and concrete and storing them onsite at the reactor facilities. Since the government cannot use the fund for this purpose, the utilities have been doing it themselves. They have also been suing the U.S. government for breach of contract. Billions of dollars in lawsuits have been filed and over a billion dollars has been paid out. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent by the U.S. government just to defend itself. There are estimates that the lawsuits may eventually reach sixteen billion in claims.
The U.S. Nuclear Energy Institute and sixteen utilities joined together in 2010 to file a lawsuit to force the U.S. Department of Energy to stop collecting the tax because of the move in 2010 by the Obama administration to cancel the Yucca Mountain Repository Project. The lawsuit said that the fee which is passed along to the public in at the rate of one-tenth of one cent per kilowatt-hour on monthly electric bills should be canceled until the government has a new plan in place for permanent disposal of nuclear waste. The office of the U.S. Secretary of Energy responded that the fee was a federal mandate and would eventually be used for permanent disposal. A blue ribbon commission was being appointed in 2010 to explore alternatives for permanent waste disposal .A few utility companies said that they were not going to invest in any more nuclear reactors until the nuclear waste disposal problem was solved. The commission delivered its report in January of 2010.
Some critics charge that the Obama administration has made it almost impossible for the fund to be used for its intended purpose. They also say that the U.S. government is hoarding the fund to reduce the apparent budget deficit.
Photo from ourenergypolicy.org:
