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Nuclear utilities say they shouldn’t have to pay an estimated $769 million this year toward a waste repository since the U.S. is abandoning the Yucca Mountain site and hasn’t settled on another disposal plan.
The Nuclear Energy Institute sent a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu last month asking that the payments be suspended.
 Dry cask storage at Diablo Canyon nuclear station. |
Since the early 1980s, utilities have paid a fee of one tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour generated in reactors to pay for a nuclear waste repository. DOE signed contracts promising to take the waste beginning in 1997. About $29.6 billion in fees and interest has gone into the nuclear fund as of the end of 2008.
President Barack Obama said earlier this year in budget documents that the U.S. would no longer seek to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev. And Chu has proposed setting up a panel to make recommendations on a waste disposal plan.
Law requires the energy secretary to determine every year the “adequacy” of the fee, the NEI said in its letter. It is now well beyond adequate, according to utilities, since the government is spending so little money on the project.
Utilities already have won court decisions allowing them to collect damages, now thought to run well over $20 billion, from the federal government for their extra costs — including building temporary steel-and-concrete silos to store spent fuels.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is also preparing to vote on a new policy for waste that would consider on-site storage adequate for the next few decades and would permit new reactors to be built even without a long-term plan for waste disposal.
Grading the Wind
The American Wind Energy Association gave the U.S. a “B” for its 2008 progress toward reaching 20 percent of electricity supply from wind energy by 2030.
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In 2008, wind made up 40 percent of the nation’s new generating capacity. Wind farm development is expected to slow sharply this year, AWEA said.
The AWEA Report Card gave a C- to the nation’s efforts on transmission. Other indicator areas were graded as follows: Technology Development A-, Manufacturing B+, and Siting B.
As one sign of the wind development slowdown, oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens said he is putting plans to build the world’s largest wind farm on the shelf. His “Pickens Plan,” announced in 2008, included a $12 billion, 4,000 MW wind farm in Texas that was expected to be complete in 2014.
Pickens said he now may place some of the 687 wind turbines bought for that project on land he owns in the Texas panhandle. But he’s also looking for smaller wind projects to participate in, possibly in the Midwest and Canada.
Pickens said in previous interviews he had trouble getting power to a distribution system and was not able to build his own transmission lines, which also led Pickens to furl his Texas-sized Texas project.
