Congress Asked to Eliminate Subsidies For Nuclear Power, Fund More Cleanup Work > Alliance for Nuclear Accountability

Congress Asked to Eliminate Subsidies For Nuclear Power, Fund More Cleanup Work

published Friday, May 08, 2009

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Radioactive Waste

Congress Asked to Eliminate Subsidies
For Nuclear Power, Fund More Cleanup Work

BY JANICE VALVERDE

The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability is asking Congress and the federal government to eliminate funding for nuclear fuel recycling research, to ban
importation of foreign low-level radioactive waste, and to make public all contracts for cleanup of defense related nuclear waste, according to alliance leaders who spoke April 27 at a press briefing.

‘‘Atomic energy is too costly, slow, and risky to solve a climate crisis,’’ the alliance said in a summary of its positions. It advocates ‘‘carbon-free and nuclear-free energy . . . that is technically and economically attainable by 2050.’’

Its major environmental policy and budget recommendations include’s providing the sufficient funds in the Department of Energy budget to assure the environmental management program complies with all relevant laws, federal facility agreements, and nuclear legacy management requirements maintaining a publicly accessible database showing all nuclear cleanup program milestones; s making public all nuclear cleanup contracts, except for proprietary information banning the importation of foreign radioactive waste that would ‘‘take up finite domestic capacity for low-level waste’’; and banning ‘‘irresponsible nuclear waste disposal,’’
not allowing any disposal of radioactive and chemical wastes in unlined pits and trenches.

Nuclear Power Said to Cost Taxpayers Too Much. The nuclear power industry has ‘‘failed to stand on its own two feet in the free market for over half a century,’’ said
Kevin Kamps, spokesman for Beyond Nuclear, a member organization of the alliance, which is a nationwide network of organizations opposed to nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The industry ‘‘has already taken $500 billion from taxpayers and ratepayers in subsidies,’’ he said.

The Congressional Budget Office has predicted defaults on over half the loans covered by $20.5 billion in federal loan guarantees made to the nuclear power industry in 2007, Kamps said. This makes taxpayers ‘‘cosigners
on new reactor and uranium enrichment projects’’ that are not good investments, he said.

Now the nuclear power industry is lobbying for another $100 billion for the same and similar projects, he said. No federal funds should support research and development on nuclear fuel reprocessing or ‘‘centralized interim storage’’ for spent nuclear fuel, both of which are top priorities of the industry, Kamps said. Fuel Reprocessing ‘Astronomically Expensive.’ Kamps said reprocessing would be ‘‘astronomically expensive for taxpayers.’’ It also would contribute to ‘‘environmental devastation,’’ producing significant amounts of low-level waste that must be disposed of, the same transuranic waste that is being cleaned up at former nuclear weapons sites, he said.

Site selection for centralized interim storage—an alternative to indefinite storage of spent nuclear fuel onsite at power plants—likely would target Native American
reservations and other low-income communities, Kamps said. Plus, it would create a ‘‘radioactive waste shell game’’ as waste is moved on roads, rails, and waterways
to sites around the country, he said.

Research and development on commercial fuel recycling and developing interim storage facilities at ‘‘volunteer sites’’ are key components of the Nuclear Energy
Institute’s ‘‘integrated used fuel management strategy,’’ which was outlined in January 2009 and posted on the institute’s website. The institute has been discussing its strategy at public forums since. Kamps said a better use of federal funds is for ‘‘hardened on-site storage’’ at reactor sites. Current storage
facilities, both spent fuel rods stored in cooling pools and dry cask storage, are ‘‘not designed to withstand terrorist attacks,’’ he said.

Kamps said Energy Secretary Steven Chu should look for individuals who share these concerns to serve on the blue ribbon commission on managing radioactive
waste. Chu announced in March that he would convene that commission (47 DEN A-7, 3/13/09).

Cleanup Contracts Should Be Public. Don Hancock, nuclear waste program director at Southwest Research and Information Center, said the Energy Department is
‘‘falling short’’ of meeting its responsibilities for transparency and accountability in using the $6 billion in America Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Pub. L. No.
111-5) funds allocated to accelerate cleanup of nuclear waste at former weapons research and production sites.

Hancock said Energy Department site managers ‘‘do not have a good track record’’ of informing local stakeholders about cleanup activities, risks, and budgets associated with projects in their vicinity, as they should.

He said lack of public scrutiny can create problems or prevent them from being resolved. A case in point is ‘‘a suspicion that there is double funding’’ in the budget for stimulus funds for cleanup at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., a repository for lowlevel
radioactive waste, Hancock said.

He also said he believes that $14 million for characterization, packaging, and transportation of the same 49 cubic meters of transuranic waste may appear in both budgets, the national lab’s and WIPP’s.

Hancock said he would raise this issue of ‘‘suspicious double funding’’ with acting head of the Energy Department’s Environmental Management program, Ine's
Triay, in a meeting with her on April 27. If the Obama administration’s fiscal 2010 budget proposes unchanged funding for the Energy Department’s Environmental Management program, that would be inadequate to meet all compliance agreements, said Susan Gordon, director of the alliance. ‘‘It will likely lead
to violations of cleanup agreements in Washington, New Mexico, and possibly other states. Delayed and underfunded cleanup threatens water supplies and human
health,’’ she said.