[cdn-nucl-l] NYTimes: Nuclear Backers Modify Stance on Waste

["Jerry Cuttler" <jerrycuttler@rogers.com>]

FYI

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Gene
To: mbrexchange@list.ans.org
Sent: Monday, January 31, 2005 1:06 AM
Subject: [MbrExchange] EnLG 2005jan31 NYTimes: Nuclear Backers Modify Stance
on Waste

Nuclear Backers Modify Stance on Waste
NYTimes January 31, 2005   By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 - Nuclear energy advocates who have said a proposed
nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada must be opened before a
new power reactor can be ordered are now backing away from that position, as
completion of the repository looks later and less certain and the prospect
for new reactors improves.

The Energy Department describes the Yucca project as essential to the future
of nuclear energy, but private sector advocates are trying to decouple the
future of the industry from the government's success there. Some nuclear
supporters say the industry has made a strategic error by tying its future
to the repository, which was once supposed to open in 1998, and is now
scheduled for 2010. The departing energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, said
earlier this month that the opening would be even further off than that. In
the meantime, as pools for spent fuel fill up, utility companies are
building giant concrete-and-steel casks near their reactors designed to hold
waste for many decades.

"The problem we now face is largely a product of industry's own making,"
said James Muckerheide, the state nuclear engineer in Massachusetts, who
monitors federal safety regulation of reactors there. "If the industry
simply shut up about Yucca Mountain, instead of dishonestly claiming that
on-site spent fuel storage is an unacceptable hazard, the issue could have
been largely defused," Mr. Muckerheide wrote in a recent e-mail message to
colleagues.

The industry has long assumed that opening the waste repository would change
the politics and make a new plant more palatable for communities.

Top industry executives are more circumspect, partly because they do not
want to appear to be dropping support for the project at Yucca, a volcanic
mountain 100 miles north of Las Vegas where the Energy Department has
already spent several billion dollars. Among other considerations, they
must, as a condition of their plant licenses, have a plan for the waste, and
for now, the Yucca site is it. But lately they have raised the idea that new
reactors, which may soon be financially practical, need not wait for the
Yucca project to be completed.

John W. Rowe, the chairman and chief executive of Exelon, the nation's
largest nuclear utility, said that building new reactors would rely on
definitive progress on a waste disposal site. While Yucca is the Energy
Department's only candidate for a burial site, there could be other options,
Mr. Rowe said, if the government took over the ultimate ownership and had
responsibility of nuclear waste. That is what the federal government was
supposed to do by 1998, under contracts signed with the utilities in the
early 1980's.

One alternative to the Yucca project could be the Private Fuel Storage
project, in which a consortium of eight utilities has negotiated with an
Indian tribe to store fuel on their reservation, west of Salt Lake City, in
dry casks for the next few decades.
"My sense is that actual operation of a geologic repository is not a
precondition for an order for a new nuclear power plant in this country,"
said James K. Asselstine, a utility research analyst at Lehman Brothers who
was a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 1982 to 1987. "I
think that the industry and the financial community will want to see
sufficient progress in the waste program, either with Yucca Mountain or some
other viable alternative."

At the Senate Energy Committee, which has historically provided strong
support for nuclear power, Alex Flint, the staff director, said that the
companies might be ready to order new reactors much sooner than the Energy
Department would be ready to accept waste at the Yucca site, "causing some
in the industry to think about other alternatives."

The Energy Department is not backing away from the Yucca project. Kyle E.
McSlarrow, who was the deputy secretary of energy for the last two years of
President Bush's first term, said in testimony before the Senate Energy
Committee in July, in a discussion of new reactors, that "continued progress
toward establishing a high-level waste repository at the Yucca Mountain site
is absolutely essential." In March, at a subcommittee hearing, Senator Pete
V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, who is one of the most prominent
supporters of nuclear energy, said, "what holds America at bay now is we
don't know what to do with the waste disposal from the nuclear power
plants."

A spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's lobbying group,
Steven Kerekes, said, "We believe it's the government's job to find a
solution, whether that be Yucca Mountain or somewhere else." But, he added,
the government is making progress at Yucca Mountain, and that progress, as
opposed to actual opening of the site, is what Wall Street and other
important participants required.

For years the lack of progress at Yucca Mountain made little difference
because unfavorable financial conditions kept operators from placing orders
for new reactors. But with higher prices for natural gas, which is an
important competitor of nuclear power, and talk of some federal financial
incentives for generators that do not produce greenhouse gases, industry
executives hope to break ground on a new reactor by 2010. Optimists think
the Yucca site could open in 2015, but most estimates are later.

Last July, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
Circuit guaranteed a major additional delay for the Yucca project by
throwing out the rules that the Environmental Protection Agency had
established for maximum allowable leakage at the site. If the Yucca site is
to open, Congress may have to vote at least once more, and Yucca Mountain's
most powerful opponent, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, just became Senate
minority leader.

Another difficulty for the Yucca project is that above-ground storage may be
cheaper, at least for the foreseeable future. Brian J. O'Connell, the
director of the Nuclear Waste Project Office at the National Association of
Regulatory Utility Commissioners, an association of state officials, said
that a case could be made that a centralized cask storage area "could be a
cost-saver for the Department of Energy," especially compared with the
emerging solution of placing cask fields at about 72 different sites. Burial
expenses, and the complexity of burial, would be reduced after several
hundred years, when some of the radioactivity has died, some experts said.
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