Some people feel that a Senate-approved bill to establish acentralized storage facility for spent-nuclear fuel in Nevada is thewrong answer to the nation's nuclear waste problem.
No one disputes that a problem exists. However, this is anexcellent bill that is backed by Republicans and Democrats, includingSen. Carol Moseley-Braun and Sen. Paul Simon. It also has thesupport of state and local government officials, and business andlabor. In particular, electricity consumers in Illinois wouldbenefit greatly if the House passes the measures and PresidentClinton signs it into law.
Nuclear power supplies 54 percent of the electricity generatedin Illinois. Since 1983, consumers of nuclear-generated electricityin the state have paid $731 million into the federal Nuclear WasteFund to finance nuclear waste management. Nationally, nearly $12billion has gone into the waste fund, but the U.S. Department ofEnergy has little to show for all of the money it has spent over theyears to establish a permanent underground repository for nuclearwaste.
In fact, the opening date for a waste repository is still whatit was in 1983: 16 years away.
Further delay poses a potential danger to public safety, sincethe water pools for spent fuel storage at nuclear power plants werenot designed to hold indefinitely large numbers of used fuel rods.Congress recognized that when it passed the 1982 Nuclear Waste PolicyAct. Last month, a federal appeals court ruled that the act requiresthe federal government to start accepting the spent fuel on Jan. 31,1998.
The Senate-passed bill provides a solution. It directs theEnergy Department to develop a centralized storage facility as atemporary measure until an underground high-level waste repository isoperating, and a transportation network to safely move spent fuelfrom nuclear power plants.
Yet opponents insist that designating the Nevada Nuclear TestSite as the interim waste storage site, as the bill effectively does,will undermine the ongoing evaluation work to determine if nearbyYucca Mountain is a suitable place for a permanent repository.
Never mind that electric utility rate payers - not taxpayers -have paid money into the Nuclear Waste Fund for the sole purpose ofhigh-level nuclear waste disposal. Leave aside the fact that theprogram has used roughly half of the fund to date, leaving a balanceof about $6 billion for use to develop an integrated approach tospent fuel management. It is disingenuous for critics to say thatfinancial resources are not available to complete a scientific studyof Yucca Mountain and develop an interim storage facility at the sametime.
Critics also are perpetuating the false assertion that enactmentof the bill will prejudice the Yucca Mountain decision. The fact is,scientific and environmental consideration of the central storagefacility and waste repository are separate activities under the bill.Both facilities are subject to separate environmental impactstatements and public hearings, and both require separate licensingprocedure by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Most importantly, the Senate bill prohibits construction of thestorage facility at the Nevada Test site until after a viabilityassessment of Yucca Mountain has been submitted to the president.
Opponents seeking to obstruct the establishment of facilitiesfor the centralized storage and permanent disposal of high-levelnuclear waste ignore the reality that maintaining spent fuelindefinitely at more than 70 nuclear plants sites around the countryincreases the risk and is extremely costly. Nuclear plants such asSquad Cities, Byron and Clinton were not designed to be wasterepositories.
Besides, doing nothing compounds the problem; it does not solveanything.
If we do not fix the problem, electricity consumers will paytwice: once to the federal government, then again for continuingon-site storage of spent fuel at nuclear power plants. And we willbe left with de facto high-level nuclear waste sites throughoutIllinois and the rest of the country.
The Clinton administration should keep in mind the seriousnessof the situation - the threat to public safety from indefinitestorage of spent fuel in densely populated areas, the threat to theeconomy if electricity generating plants are forced to close, thethreat to our nation's credibility if we continue to sidestep theproblem - and recognize that we have the technology to dispose ofnuclear waste safety. The only wise course is for the House to passa companion nuclear waste bill and for President Clinton to sign it.
Barclay G. Jones is professor and head of the department ofnuclear engineering at the University of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign.
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