Cold Cash And Hot Waste

Buried deep in the bowels of the Interweb, I ran across this little story the other day.

A charge for electricity that millions of Americans didn't even know they pay will suddenly disappear Friday...

The Department of Energy has been tacking on a fee of one-quarter of a penny on each kilowatt hour of electricity to fund a dump site for nuclear waste. That may not be much - it's about 15 to 20 cents per month on an average electric bill - but it adds up. It amounts to around $740 million annually. The government has been collecting the fee since 1983, and now has $31 billion in cash sitting in the fund.

Actually, around $43 billion has been collected, but about $12 billion of that money was spent on trying to develop the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada, before the Obama administration killed it.

The court-ordered suspension (in response to a lawsuit filed by power companies and state regulators) may be a modest victory for consumers, but it reflects the government's failure over the last 40 years to get rid of what is now nearly 70,000 metric tons of highly radioactive spent fuel, accumulating at 100 nuclear reactors across the nation.

"It is irresponsible on the government's part to not move forward on a program that has already been paid for," said Marvin Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington trade group that filed a suit against the fees.

Irresponsible? It's criminal. If a private company did this it would be called fraud, and people would be sent to jail.

Now, there is virtually no plan moving forward in Washington to build a dump or even a temporary central storage site. The $31-billion trust fund will continue to accrue interest and is available to help build a dump at some point, though it is probably not enough. Experts had estimated that the Yucca Mountain project would cost at least $100 billion.

So what's currently being done with all that radioactive nuclear waste produced by nuke power plants?

Under guard by SWAT teams with machine guns, the spent fuel is slowly decaying in deep pools of cooling water and in outdoor concrete casks from the California shores of the Pacific Ocean to the banks of the James River in Virginia. The waste is expensive to store and often cited as a public safety risk.

Not to mention an attractive target for terrorists. Dirty bomb, anyone?

Decades ago, the government promised nuclear utilities when they built reactors that the Energy Department would dispose of the spent fuel, temporarily easing the way for the development of nuclear energy that now supplies 20% of the nation's electricity.

Yeah, we all know what a promise from the government is worth. Just ask any veteran.

The nuclear and utility industries, which have privately complained that the government took the money and left them holding the deadly waste, filed suit to block the fees. Last year, an appeals court ruled that the government had no reasonable plan to build a dump and could not reasonably estimate the cost of any future dump, ordering that it had to suspend collections of the fee.

It has taken about six months for the Energy Department to carry out the legal order.

"The federal courts have gotten fed up with what the Department of Energy is doing," said Jay Silberg, the industry's lead attorney in the case against the fees. "We want something in exchange for our money."

Most of the taxpayers I know want the same thing.

Of course, halting collection of the fees is a minor step. The real issue is a long-term solution for handling and disposing of nuclear waste.

...in 1987, Congress directed the Energy Department to build a dump at Yucca Mountain, a volcanic ridge inside the Nevada National Security Site, the former test range for detonating nuclear weapons. At the time, Nevada was among the politically weakest states, the test range was already radioactively contaminated and scientists claimed the repository's geology would keep the waste isolated.

But the plan began to collapse when the state raised a long series of scientific objections to the site. When Democrat Harry Reid became the Senate majority leader, he vowed to kill the project and he delivered on the pledge when Obama was elected. The president appointed a blue ribbon committee to study the next step. It delivered a report in 2012, suggesting that the disposal program be taken away from the Energy Department and an interim storage site be established before a permanent repository is built.

Oh my aching back. Trash the existing plan. Appoint a committee to study the thing to death. Recommend an interim storage site. Pass the buck. Delay, obfuscate, ignore, and get out of office before the chickens come home to roost.

But I have a solution...