Industry Launches Court Fight Over US Nuclear Waste Fund Fee
Written by NucNet
Tuesday, 06 April 2010
US nuclear industry leaders are taking legal action over the Department of Energy’s (DOE) refusal to suspend collection of the country’s Nuclear Waste Fund fee.
The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) and several of its member companies filed a suit in federal court yesterday seeking suspension of the fee that consumers of electricity produced at nuclear energy facilities pay into the fund.
The lawsuit asks the court to direct the DOE to suspend collection of the one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour surcharge that consumers pay on their monthly electric bills until the DOE complies with provisions of nuclear waste laws that require it to conduct an annual ‘fee adequacy review’ for the used fuel management programme.
In a letter sent to energy secretary Steven Chu last July, the NEI said the DOE had failed to properly account for the effect of the planned termination of the Yucca Mountain repository project on the programme’s financial needs, and that collection of the fee should be suspended until a used nuclear fuel management programme “is defined and properly evaluated”.
The NEI said Mr Chu has declined to suspend the fee, which amounts to about 750 million US dollars (USD) (560 million euro) in annual revenues for the fund.
The Nuclear Waste Fund has a balance of more than USD 24 billion, but the NEI said the federal government’s budget request for fiscal year 2011 does not include any funding for the used nuclear fuel management programme.
By law, electric companies that operate America’s commercial nuclear power plants have contracts with the DOE for used reactor fuel management. Under the terms of the contracts, DOE was to start moving used reactor fuel from nuclear energy facilities beginning in 1998.
The US has set up a special commission to provide recommendations for developing a long-term solution to managing the nation’s used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste, in light of the government’s decision not to proceed with the Yucca Mountain deep geological repository.
