Karl Herchenroeder
RadWaste Monitor
12/4/2015
Congress should establish and oversee an independent body to manage the multibillion-dollar Nuclear Waste Fund (NWF), a Montana state official told a congressional panel on Thursday.
The NWF was created to fund radioactive waste disposal activities authorized by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, a federal law that established a national program for the disposal of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel. The NWF is a “pay for service fee” funded by consumers who benefit from nuclear-generated electricity. To date the fund has accrued $34.3 billion in intragovernmental assets.
Travis Kavulla, president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and a Montana Public Service Commission member, offered his recommendation during a House Energy and Commerce Environment and the Economy Subcommittee meeting on budgetary, funding, and scoring challenges facing the fund. He said American taxpayers have paid for and deserve a permanent solution to nuclear waste disposal, adding that the NWF is self-funded and should be treated as such.
The Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 subjected the NWF to a government-wide deficit reduction process. Amendments to the act in 1987 placed NWF appropriations under a spending cap applicable to all domestic discretionary programs, even though the fund has its own dedicated source of funding. This forced NWF funding to compete with spending programs that do not have dedicated funding. In turn, the Office of Management and Budget dropped its practice of setting separate budget planning targets for the fund, opening it up to competition from other Department of Energy programs within a single DOE budget target for domestic discretionary spending.
“This forces spending from the NWF to compete with other spending programs that never had a dedicated funding stream,” Kavulla said. “This approach is unfair to ratepayers and inappropriate for a fund designed to finance the extremely protracted life cycle of a capital-intensive disposal program. It makes no sense to treat funds collected specifically to support the disposal of used commercial reactor fuel as discretionary.”
Kavulla argued that flexibility for the multibillion-dollar fund is essential for interim and permanent solutions to America’s nuclear waste disposal problem. During his testimony he cited a report from the Blue Ribbon Commission, an advisory panel formed by the secretary of Energy at the request of the Obama administration. The 2012 report states that in order for the waste management program to succeed, the NWF must be allowed to work as intended without restriction from unrelated federal budget constraints.
Kavulla said the administration’s failure to take ownership of the NWF and develop a permanent nuclear waste repository “has been substantial.” In 2010, the Obama administration halted work on the planned waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, opting instead for “consent-based” interim siting.
“DOE is more than 17 years behind schedule in its contractual obligations to remove and dispose of civilian nuclear waste,” Kim Cawley, head of the Congressional Budget Office’s Natural and Physical Resources Cost Estimates Unit, told the panel. “The federal government has already paid $5.3 billion in damages to electric utilities, and DOE estimates that its remaining liabilities will total $23.7 billion.”
“This sorry history strongly suggests that the management of federal responsibilities for integrated used fuel management should be more successful if assigned to a new organization with a single-minded devotion to the cause of permanently storing used fuel,” Kavulla said. “Congress should charter a new federal corporation dedicated solely to implementing the nuclear waste management program and empowered with the authority and resources – including direct access to the NWF outside the current appropriations process – that is necessary for such a mission to succeed.”
Kavulla acknowledged that any progress on a permanent storage site for spent nuclear fuel might be decades away, but he argued that Congress needs to link interim storage solutions to its more permanent plan. Two states, Texas and New Mexico, have expressed interest in hosting an interim storage site. According to Kuvulla, New Mexico officials are unwilling to commit to hosting without a more concrete solution in place for permanent storage.
U.S. reactor sites now hold 74,000 metric tons of commercial spent fuel, while producing about 2,000 tons of waste every year, according to numbers presented Thursday.
