The U.S. Chamber of Commerce this week joined a coalition of labor unions and other nongovernmental organizations in pressing Congress to end the long impasse over management of the nation’s spent nuclear reactor fuel.
“Another year without progress on the Yucca Mountain repository license application and consolidated interim storage in untenable. It is time for the federal government to meet its statutory and contractual obligations,” the 15 organizations said in a Dec. 4 letter to the Republican and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill.
The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act directed the Department of Energy to begin disposal of tens of thousands of tons of used fuel from U.S. commercial nuclear reactors by Jan. 31, 1998. It also established a Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for that repository, which a 1987 amendment to the legislation designated be built under Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
More than two decades past the deadline, DOE still does not have a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build and operate the Yucca Mountain disposal facility. The licensing process has been suspended for nearly a decade, and the Trump administration has not persuaded Congress to provide funding to resume the proceeding.
In the interim, nuclear utilities paid over $40 billion into the Nuclear Waste Fund and the federal government has paid more than $7 billion in damages to those power providers stuck with the spent fuel, the letter notes.
“Now is the time to end the stalemate, and for the House and Senate to work in a bipartisan manner to place the federal government on a path to fulfill its responsibilities and to unburden taxpayers of the ever-mounting liability by establishing a durable program for managing used fuel,” the groups said.
Along with the Chamber of Commerce, signatories to the letter included the Nuclear Energy Institute, the American Nuclear Society, the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, the National Association of Manufacturers, and North America’s Building Trades Unions.
