In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, 42 U.S.C. 10101 et seq., which stipulated that electric utilities that owned and operated nuclear power plants would have to enter into a contractual quid pro quo with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Plant owners would pay the DOE one mill (or one-tenth of 1 cent) for every kilowatt hour of nuclear-generated electricity sold to their customers. In return, the DOE would develop a national repository for permanent disposal of the utilities’ spent fuel. Power plants would store the spent fuel themselves until the DOE’s facility was ready in 1998, the date established by the act. That facility is the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository in Nevada.
As of this writing — more than a quarter-century after most of the contracts were signed and more than 11 years after the DOE was obligated to begin removing spent fuel from the utilities’ plant sites — not a single spent-fuel assembly has been taken by the federal government, even though nuclear utilities have paid the DOE $16 billion in fees. In fact, the DOE now hopes that Yucca Mountain will begin accepting spent fuel in 2020, even though the head of the program recently said that meeting that deadline is probably an “extreme stretch.” Lisa Mascaro, “Director: Yucca nuke dump an ‘extreme stretch,’ ” Las Vegas Sun, Dec. 4, 2008, at www.lasvegassun.com/blogs/early-line/2008/dec/04/director-yucca-nuke-dump-extreme-stretch.
