Yucca Mountain News Clips
Friday, October 6, 2006
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North Adams Transcript
October 06, 2006
Yankee awarded $32.9M
U.S. government ordered to pay for storage costs
By Jennifer Huberdeau
North Adams Transcript
ROWE — A federal judge has ordered the U.S. government to pay millions of dollars toward the cost of nuclear-waste storage at Yankee Atomic Electric Co.'s closed Rowe plant and two others. But it may be years, before the case is resolved.
And finding a permanent solution for storing high-level radioactive waste across the country could take even longer.
U.S. Court of Federal Claims Senior Judge James F. Merow ruled in favor of three former Yankee nuclear power plants on Sept. 30, awarding each plant damages for storing high-level radioactive fuel rods the Department of Energy has failed to remove from the sites.
Yankee Rowe was awarded $32.9 million in damages, while Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Co. received $34.9 million and Maine Yankee Atomic Power Co. received $75.8 million.
"While the court's decision will need to be reviewed and evaluated, the Yankee companies' initial reaction to the monetary award is very positive," said Michael Thomas, Yankee vice-president and chief financial officer in a prepared statement. "However, the ruling does not solve the problem of used nuclear fuel remaining at the plant sites, and the federal government is urged to remove the material promptly. We hope this ruling will spur the U.S. Department of Energy to begin fulfilling its obligation."
The three plants initially sued the Department of Energy in 1998, when it was supposed to remove the spent fuel rods. In 2003, the Court of Federal Claims ruled that the plants could seek damages.
Yankee officials announced that year that increased security and insurance costs in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were pushing the initial $71 million in damages being sought in 1999 to over $231 million.
"The reason we did not receive the full amount, is that the judge awarded 'actual cost occurred' through 2001," Yankee spokeswoman Kelley Smith said in a phone interview Wednesday. "Our claims included projected costs for up to 2010, when the government was supposed to remove the fuel rods. For costs after 2001, we are being allowed to file additional claims."
She said the two other facilities received higher awards because the judge allowed all financial claims except those for "wet pool" storage. Yankee Rowe kept its rods in a reinforced concrete underground pool until 2003, when the last of the 553 rods were moved into so-called "dry-cask" storage containers.
"Yankee Rowe stored its fuel rods in for a longer period of time," Smith said. "The wet-pool storage claim was larger than the other two plants, so the award is a little longer than the others."
According to Smith, the award money will eventually be put into the Yankee decommissioning pool and used to offset the cost passed on to rate payers.
However, Yankee officials are not seeing the ruling as a means to an end. They want the plant's spent fuel rods removed from the site.
"As we say, we hope this spurs the federal government to take action sooner," Smith said. "Ultimately, the court proceedings are providing financial relief, but it doesn't relieve the responsibility of storing the high-level radioactive waste."
In 2003, federal officials were projecting 2010 as potential opening of Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a permanent storage site for fuel rods, but now that date has been pushed back until 2017. And there's no guarantee the Yucca site will be approved.
"All of the fuel rods (553) are still residing at the Rowe plant," Smith said. "The government has only identified Yucca Mountain as a fuel-storage site, yet they are now saying 2017, maybe, when it will possibly be operational."
She said the processes of opening Yucca Mountain have been marred by bureaucratic red tape over the years.
"This has been the only national location identified by the government for high-level waste," she said. "They have spent billions of dollars researching this site. Without any other option, the fuel rods must remain at Yankee Rowe unless the government comes up with a temporary location."
Yankee Rowe closed in 1992 after 31 years of operation. After months of public outcry over the safety of the facility's reactor vessel, its owners decided to close the plant rather then spend the money to prove the vessel wasn't cracked and the plant was safe.
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North Adams Transcript
October 06, 2006
Editorial: Wasted energy
Federal Judge James Merow was right this week to award Yankee Atomic Electric Co. (and eventually its rate payers) $143 million from the federal government for its failure to remove high-level nuclear waste (i.e., spent fuel rods) from three closed power plants, including the nearby Rowe facility.
The U.S. Department of Energy has dragged its feet for years and failed to live up to its commitment to find a permanent solution for the disposal of this dangerous radioactive waste, which will remain deadly for thousands and thousands of years (some of the waste has a half-life of 100,000 years).
While the Yucca Mountain proposal flounders amid lawsuits and questions from scientists over whether it would actually be a safe site for all the nation's nuclear waste, that waste festers at more than 131 locations across the country. Many of these sites, like Rowe, are along rivers; some are on lakes or oceanfront properties. None of them has ever been researched for their capacity for long-term storage. And each of them, however secure our governments says they are, is potentially a target for terrorist attack.
How much waste is there? According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, about 54,000 metric tons at private nuclear plants and another 13,000 metric tons in government defense installations, with an estimated 2,000 more metric tons being produced annually. That's a staggering amount of this lethal poison, and the cost just to store it "safely" where it is, amounts to billions. The Energy Department has so far spent about $10 billion developing the Yucca Mountain repository and now doesn't expect that to open until 2017 — seven years behind schedule — if all legalities are resolved. Any bets they will be?
The money due to Yankee is just the beginning — the damage award unveiled Wednesday represented only the cost for the three plants' storage of spent fuel rods through 2001. Yankee obviously plans to sue for costs incurred since then, and can one doubt other nuclear power companies will be far behind?
Aside from the astounding cost factor of storage, the Department of Energy has an outdated, foolish plan for transporting the waste, if and when a permanent disposal site is approved. The department plans to take the waste piecemeal from various plants, transporting the oldest waste first. Yankee Rowe estimated in 2003 that it would take until 2023 to dispose of its 533 spent fuel rods — if the Yucca Mountain repository opened in 2010. Doing the math, we're now looking at 2030 before all the rods might be gone.
Despite the U.S. government's bumbling efforts to cope with the highly toxic leftovers of what was billed for decades as "clean, efficient energy," our plants continue to toil across the country, producing heaps of these pernicious contaminants that we simply don't know how to get rid of and that could threaten the very planet we live on.
The public should be enraged. The government should be ashamed. And working together, we should find a solution — soon.
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Bangladesh Financial Express
October 06, 2006
Bad news for the Indo-US nuclear deal
Praful Bidwai
Inter Press Service
The controversial US-India "civilian nuclear cooperation" agreement met a major setback over the weekend when the US Senate recessed without voting on a bill that would have granted President George W Bush the powers to enable the deal to be implemented.
The Indian government has been rattled by this development and is pinning its hopes on a brief "lame duck" session of the US Congress in mid-November, when it reconvenes after elections to be held on November 7.
Both the Bush administration and the Indian government had invested a great deal of effort into lobbying for a quick passage of the bill through the Senate. The House of Representatives has already passed broadly similar legislation. The two chambers of Congress are later meant to reconcile the two versions and produce a single, unified law.
This law would implicitly recognize India as a nuclear-weapons state and permit civilian nuclear commerce with it even though India has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has become a nuclear-weapons state in violation of NPT principles.
However, the Senate bill first ran into numerous procedural complications and then got tied up with the extraneous or unrelated agendas of some senators.
For instance, Minority Leader Harry Reid moved an amendment that would prevent any spent nuclear fuel coming to his native state of Nevada for storage at the Yucca Mountain Repository. This would presumably include fuel burned in reactors supplied to India by the US or from plants that use materials traded under the India-US nuclear-cooperation deal.
On Saturday, the Democrats tabled as many as 19 amendments and rejected a proposal by Majority Leader Bill Frist to have the bill passed in its present form through a "unanimous consent" procedure, with the promise of some changes to be considered and discussed later.
Although the Democrats agreed to accord a high priority to the bill in the lame-duck session coming up after November 13 - that is, after the mid-term elections that could alter the makeup of Congress - there is no guarantee that it will really be taken up for vote. The Democrats are expected to do better than the Republicans in the election and may not allow the chamber to re-convene until January.
"All this is bad news for the deal," said M V Ramana, an independent nuclear-affairs expert based at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development in Bangalore. "But it's not terrible news.
There is still a good chance that the Senate resolution will eventually go through. But there is now a higher probability that more and more conditions will be imposed which limit the degree of cooperation permitted under the deal or demand special assurances from India, which are not reciprocally sought from the US."
If the deal cannot be approved by the present Congress, it will once again have to go through the entire process of drafting of separate resolutions for the two chambers of the new Congress that convenes in January, and of securing agreement on them all over again.
The more conditions imposed on the deal, the more it will differ in content from the original agreements signed between Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last March.
"It's clear that the fate of the nuclear deal now depends on the arcane processes and parochial concerns that mark US domestic politics, rather than on the dynamics of the burgeoning India-United States strategic relationship," argued Achin Vanaik, professor of international relations and global policies at Delhi University. "Various senators' preferences and sectional interests will influence the way the agreement is shaped.
The initiative is no longer in India's hands."
The Indian government is particularly disappointed and nervous at the weekend's result because it had made a strong pitch for the deal through its top diplomat and special envoy Shyam Saran and, more recently, through Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee.
Last week in the US, Mukherjee met with various members of the India Caucus in Congress, as well as the American Jewish Committee and influential representatives of the Indian-American community.
Business groups, in particular the defense-industry lobby and manufacturers of nuclear-power equipment, have also been pitching for the nuclear deal, according to Subrata Ghoshroy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies. He calls the deal a "triumph of the business lobby". But the triumph has not yet been fully accomplished.
Had the Senate vote gone through before the recess, India would have been in an advantageous position at consultations due this month in the Nuclear Suppliers' Group. The deal must be approved by the 45-member NSG before it becomes effective. The International Atomic Energy Agency too must clear it.
There may be some opposition in the NSG to the agreement from the Scandinavian states, Ireland and New Zealand. China too is known to be uncomfortable with it but is keeping its cards close to its chest.
Besides this uncertainty, and problems likely to be caused by a shift in the balance of power between the Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress, the deal faces two obstacles: one in the United States, the other in India.
First, the Senate bill explicitly prohibits the "export or re-export to India of any equipment, materials, or technology related to the enrichment of uranium, the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel or the production of heavy water". But the Indian nuclear lobby is extremely keen on the right to reprocess spent fuel from power reactors, whether imported or domestic, so that plutonium can extracted from it.
India has drawn up super-ambitious plans to produce 275,000 megawatts of nuclear-generated power (or more than double the Indian power-generation capacity today from all sources combined) by the mid-21st century. This presumes the use of fast-breeder reactors based on the reprocessing of spent fuel.
India's Atomic Energy Commission chairman is on the record as saying that he won't accept a deal that does not allow reprocessing of spent fuel.
It is not clear how the Bush and Singh governments will crack this nut.
Their difficulties will grow if the Democrats emerge stronger in next month's election. In that case, the influence of the traditional non-proliferation lobby will grow, and the deal's passage will bear its imprint.
The domestic Indian obstacle is the political opposition, especially the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which rejects any shift away from the goalposts set by the original July 2005 agreement.
It will try to hold the Singh government down to its earlier commitments, which call for unconditional nuclear cooperation. This is likely to narrow the government's room for maneuver and compromise.
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Platts
October 04, 2006
Court awards $142.8 million in damages for spent fuel management
Washington (Platts)
The US Court of Federal Claims unsealed a decision Wednesday awarding a total of $142.8 million in damages to three New England utilities that have had to manage spent nuclear fuel storage at their shutdown reactor sites.
The utilities--Yankee Atomic Electric Co., Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Co., and Maine Yankee Atomic Power Co.--sued the federal government in 1998 after the Department of Energy failed to begin disposing of utility spent fuel by a 1998 contract date.
Nothing in the decision, which the court issued September 30, addresses the utilities' concerns about when the spent nuclear fuel will be removed from their decommissioned reactor sites.
The court had placed the ruling under seal in late September because it was concerned the document might contain proprietary business or security information.
The federal government has 60 days to appeal the court ruling.
--Elaine Hiruo, elaine_hiruo@platts.com
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TPM Cafe
October 05, 2006
George Bush Proposes Yucca Mountain Facility to Store Radioactive Republicans
By Stirling Newberry
George Bush today proposed a new facility to store long term radioactive Republican politicians. The target would be the ability to contain Republican politicians whose high level danger to tax cuts and social security privatization reaches critical levels. Current Republican radioactive politicians are kept in temporary storage in Virginia, often with mansions constructed prior to their being declared publicly radioactive.
There have been inquires from Hewlett-Packard about whether private sector high level radioactive executives could be stored at the facility - noting that in the recent case there that even the standard industry procedure of using a golden parachute to shroud the radioactivity is in sufficient.
The press is already noting that these calls from the White House have been made more urgent by the very public meltdown of Mark Foley. The general belief in Washington is that the Fordham explosion, the by-product of trying to rapidly shut him down before any more damage was done, has only moved Dennis Hastert closer to critical.
While some Republicans believe Hastert's levels of radioactivity are tolerable until after the elections, arguing that if Hastert were removed now that the burst of radiation might be lethal to other members of the Republican leadership, particularly people like Rep. Johnson of Connecticut who were partially contaminated by their involvement in the page program oversight.
The other body of Republican opinion however, is that by giving a face to Republican radioactivity, that the current scandal will expose the voter's optic nerves, and this might sharpen their ability to remember in November. A White House insider, speaking on the condition of anonymity said that while Bush is supporting Hastert's handling of the scandal in statements to the press, privately he is angered that the cooling program of lower gasoline prices is being wasted by allowing the Foley reactor to get out of control.
The current situation shows the difference between the present ad hoc storage program, and the previous ways of handling radioactive politicians. Democrats have tended to either use jail, or academia, though in recent years they too have favored dumping radioactive politicians into K street storage. In no small part this is because the Republican radioactivity is exacerbated by its combination with hypocrisy - having come to Washington claiming reform, term limits and moral character as the solution to the endless treadmill of scandal, Foley being caught having stayed in Congress long after term limits would have sent him home, and having written the very legislation which his behavior violated is seen as symptomatic of a Republican party that can't keep the one real promise they made: that no one would get off an elected official inside a the White House or Capitol building.
The storage facility was previously discussed, but with the apperant containment of the Abramoff scandal - even with dozens of visits to the White House - the urgency seemed to fade. While the toxic clean up of Ohio seemed likely to cost the Republicans the governorship, it was not clear that there would be consequences beyond that, or perhaps Burns in Montana. While having to seal up Rep. Ney was a blow, over all the loses seemed acceptable.
Democrats are already objecting to the use of public money to deal with the after effects of what is a partisan effort to ignore the growing danger signs inside of Congress, and argue that there is no need for a federally funded facility to take care of a Republican problem. In part this is thought to be their position because it is well known that radioactive Democratic politicians, such as Rep. Jefferson, would not be eligible for storage in the new facility.
Of course the question that would have to be asked is how the Senate would act. Partially because there are growing worries that Senators Bill Frist and George Allen are reaching dangerous levels of radioactivity. Frist because of his connections with the health care industry, and Allen because of a string of racist comments that build on a long pattern of behavior going back to his college years. Senate Republicans would be loathe to move on an expensive facility which would store House waste, without having some plan for dealing with their own.
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Monticello Times
October 05, 2006
Dry storage ok'd for the nuclear plant
By Kathleen Ostroot
News Editor
On Thursday, Sept. 28, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission unanimously approved Xcel Energy's request to store radioactive nuclear waste in up to 30 above-ground containers in a storage facility at the Monticello nuclear plant.
"This decision will take effect in June of 2007 unless the state legislature decides to review it. They can choose to say nothing," Mary Sandok, of Xcel Energy, said.
Because the federal government's Yucca Mountain waste storage facility in Nevada is not complete, further operation of the Monticello plant requires that the waste be stored on-site.
In separate but related actions, Xcel asked the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to extend its license until 2030, and permission to build the temporary waste storage facility will be necessary to continue operating the facility.
Currently, Xcel's 40-year operating license expires that year, which means if the plant is not granted a license extension, it will be decommissioned and shut down.
Xcel will store the radioactive spent fuel rods in 20-ton dry, sealed steel canisters, and place those canisters within a large concrete vault that would be built near the plant's reactor building.
The plant operates a single-unit boiling water reactor powered by nuclear fuel. In such a configuration, a nuclear reaction in the reactor core generates heat, which boils water to produce steam inside the reactor vessel, which is then routed to turbine generators and produces electrical power. The water is cooled in a condenser and returned to the reactor vessel to be boiled again. The cooling water is force-circulated by electrically powered feed water pumps. Emergency cooling water is supplied by other pumps, which can be powered by diesel fuel.
Proposed spent fuel storage
At present, the spent fuel pool is located on the refueling floor in the reactor building of the plant, and is filled with storage racks that hold the spent fuel assemblies and other irradiated reactor components. The water in the pool is 37 feet, 9 inches deep. The pool is equipped with redundant cooling systems to remove heat that continues to be generated by the process. The water above the spent fuel also provides a radiation shield. The spent fuel pool provides an area to fill the casks with the spent fuel.
Xcel estimates that 1,520 spent fuel assemblies would be discharged from Monticello's reactor during operations between 2010 and 2030.
Xcel Energy proposes to use storage containers that each hold 61 spent fuel assemblies.
In order for the plant to operate from 2010 through 2030, up to 30 storage containers will be necessary, according to Xcel.
The pool area is configured so that a container can be lowered into the pool and assemblies transferred to it for removal to dry storage or transport.
Currently, the Monticello plant's NRC license allows for storage of up to 2,237 spent fuel assemblies in the current spent fuel storage rack configuration.
Eight of the licensed spaces are not available because they do not meet the required dimensional specifications, leaving 2,229 spaces available in the spent fuel pool. Since 20 of the available spaces hold control rod blades, there are 2,209 spaces available for spent nuclear fuel storage in the spent fuel pool.
The new storage facility proposed by Xcel Energy will be provided by Transnuclear, Inc. According to the Web site www.transnuclear.com, Transnuclear provides services for the "nuclear fuel cycle," including transportation, storage and handling of spent nuclear fuel, radioactive waste and other radioactive materials. The system it has proposed for the Monticello plant-the Transnuclear NUHOMS 61 BT spent nuclear fuel container, storage vault, and transport system-was licensed by the NRC in 2001.
"Cost estimates are $35 million for the structure and the first 10 casts that will be loaded. It is still much cheaper than building a new facility," Brad Sawatzke, plant manager said.
The proposed dry spent fuel storage facility would consist of a lighted area, approximately 400 feet long by 200 feet wide, roughly 3.5 acres in size, located adjacent to the reactor and generating building on the 2,150-acre Xcel property.
The tallest structures would be the light poles, which are approximately 40 feet tall. Two fences would surround the facility, with a monitored clear zone between them. Within the storage area, spent fuel will be encased in a canister, placed in a transfer cask for removal to modular concrete vaults, then removed from the transfer cask and stored in the vault, which will be placed on a reinforced concrete support pad, 18 to 24 inches thick. A small concrete building, approximately 20 feet by 22 feet, would be located within the installation to house electrical equipment. The site and storage vaults would be monitored with cameras, other security devices and temperature sensors. An access road would connect the storage facility to the rest of the plant.
Certificate of need
According to Minnesota statutes, approval is subject to accepting a certificate of need by the Public Utilities Commission. In any proceeding under this subdivision, the commission may make a decision that could result in a shutdown of a nuclear generating facility. In considering an application for a certificate of need pursuant to this subdivision, the commission may consider whether the public utility that owns the nuclear generation facility in the state is in compliance with statutes and the utility's past performance.
The plant must also show that the storage of spent nuclear fuel in the pool and in dry casks at a nuclear generating plant is managed to facilitate the shipment of waste out of state to a permanent or interim storage facility as soon as feasible in a manner that allows the continued operation of the plant consistent with statutes.
The plant must also show that the demand for electricity cannot be met more cost-effectively through energy conservation and load-management measures, unless the applicant has otherwise justified its need.
The selected dry spent fuel storage system will not generate waste or pollutants, Sawatzke said. Because the canister and cask assembly is sealed, welded and decontaminated before leaving the reactor building, no residual radioactive contamination is released to the environment.
"Direct radiation from the storage system will be released, but it will be limited to low levels by the heavy gamma and neutron shielding in the over pack and vault design. Radiation doses to the population around the site will be significantly below federal requirements," Sawatzke said.
According to Xcel, no alternative was shown to be more reasonable and prudent than Xcel's proposed storage facility. It is about $1 billion less expensive for ratepayers than any alternative analyzed in the record, according to the office of administrative report from hearing before the commission.
Xcel Energy has invested an average of $10 million a year in capital projects to meet regulatory requirements, perform preventive maintenance, and address component wear and aging. Only limited major capital investments will be needed to keep the plant operating efficiently beyond 2010. Xcel Energy has about $135 million in investments above normal annual investments that may occur in the future.
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Bangor Daily News
October 05, 2006
N-plants awarded $143M
By H. Josef Hebert
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Three closed nuclear power plants have been awarded $143 million because the government has failed to take away their used reactor fuel rods.
One corporate executive said Wednesday the money will be used to reimburse ratepayers for decommissioning costs.
The award by the U.S. Federal Court of Claims settles a long-standing legal fight waged by operators of the three reactors in Maine, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
It also could foreshadow a series of additional financial awards to operators of reactors nationwide who have argued the federal government broke contractual agreements that promised the waste would be taken by 1998.
The award, granted by Court of Claims Judge James Merow on Saturday, was unsealed Wednesday.
It gives $32.9 million in damages to Yankee Atomic Electric Co., operator of the Yankee Rowe reactor in Massachusetts; $34.1 million to Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Co., operator of Connecticut Yankee reactor; and $75.8 million to Maine Yankee Atomic Power Co., operator of the Maine Yankee reactor.
The companies had asked for $177 million.
Michael Thomas, vice president and chief financial officer of the three Yankee companies, said that while the monetary award is "very positive ... [it] does not solve the problem of used nuclear fuel remaining at the plant sites."
"We hope this ruling will spur the U.S. Department of Energy to begin fulfilling its obligation," said Thomas.
Thomas said during an interview that he expects the government to appeal the judge’s decision. Eventually, the money would be used to reimburse ratepayers for some of the three plants’ decommissioning costs, he said.
The three reactors, operated by the Yankee companies, are each owned by up to eight New England utilities.
There was no immediate comment from the energy department on the issue.
The used reactor fuel remains in aboveground, dry cask storage at the sites near Wiscasset, Maine; Rowe, Mass.; and Haddam, Conn. Yankee Rowe was shut down in 1992 and the other two reactors in 1997.
Federal courts previously have ruled that the Department of Energy was contractually obligated to begin taking used reactor fuel from commercial power plants by 1998. But the ruling was the first finding of a significant financial settlement.
The government missed the 1998 deadline because it doesn’t have any place to put the spent fuel. A proposed central repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is behind schedule in being completed.
Once expected to open in 2010, the Yucca waste site has yet to receive a federal license and is not likely to be completed - if licensed - by 2018 at the earliest.
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MaineToday
October 05, 2006
Maine Yankee owners win suit
Operators of three closed nuclear power plants, including Maine Yankee in Wiscasset, have been awarded $143 million because the government has failed to take away their used reactor fuel rods.
The award by the U.S. Federal Court of Claims settles a longstanding legal fight waged by operators of the three reactors. The others are in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
It also could foreshadow a series of additional financial awards to operators of reactors nationwide who have argued that the federal government broke contractual agreements that promised the waste would be taken by 1998.
The award, granted by Court of Claims Judge James Merow on Saturday, was unsealed on Wednesday.
It gives $32.9 million in damages to Yankee Atomic Electric Co., operator of the Yankee Rowe reactor in Massachusetts; $34.1 million to Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Co., operator of the Connecticut Yankee reactor; and $75.8 million to Maine Yankee Atomic Power Co., operator of the Maine Yankee reactor.
The companies had asked for $177 million.
Company officials said the decision does not solve the underlying problem that sparked the lawsuit -- the government's failure to meet a deadline to dispose of spent nuclear fuel that is today being stored in above-ground facilities in three New England states.
"We hope this ruling will spur the U.S. Department of Energy to begin fulfilling its obligation," said Michael Thomas, vice president and chief financial officer of the three Yankee companies.
Thomas said in an interview that he expects the government to appeal the decision. There was no immediate comment from the Energy Department on the issue.
The money would be used to reimburse ratepayers for some of the three plants' decommissioning costs, he said.
The federal government collected $24 billion from nuclear plants over more than a decade to pay for waste storage, and was obligated to take used reactor fuel from commercial power plants by 1998. The government missed the 1998 deadline because it doesn't have a place to put the spent fuel.
A proposed central repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is behind schedule in being completed.
The used reactor fuel remains in above-ground, dry cask storage at the sites near Wiscasset, Rowe, Mass., and Haddam, Conn.
Yankee Rowe was shut down in 1992 and the other two reactors closed in 1997.
The Yankee company first asked the court to order the Energy Department to dispose of the rods, but the request was denied, said Maine Yankee spokesman Eric Howes.
The court said the company could sue the federal government for monetary damages, Howes said.
He said the latest order allows the company to seek additional damages if the government does not collect the spent rods.
Howes said the company will continue to lobby politicians to have the spent fuel removed.
He said the company expects the Yucca waste site to be licensed by mid-2007 and ready to receive fuel by 2017. The site was once expected to open in 2010.
In a written statement Wednesday afternoon, U.S. Rep. Tom Allen, D-Maine, chastised the energy department for dragging its feet on the Yucca Mountain site.
The three reactors operated by the Yankee companies are each owned by as many as eight New England utilities.
-- Staff Writer Elbert Aull contributed to this report.
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Platts
October 03, 2006
Congress urged to oppose away-from-reactor storage sites
Washington (Platts)
More than 100 advocacy groups are urging Congress to oppose the interim spent fuel storage facilities called for in House and Senate energy appropriations bills for fiscal 2007 and to concentrate, instead, on safeguarding spent fuel at reactor sites. Letters were sent to every member of Congress October 3 by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and the Union for Concerned Scientists, among others. The groups said "there are numerous reasons why away-from-reactor storage is not even a temporary waste solution." Centralized storage would not reduce the number of locations where commercial spent fuel is stored and would "unnecessarily increase transport risks to the public," they said. The House-passed funding bill would require that integrated spent fuel reprocessing/recycling facilities include a storage facility for utility spent fuel. The Senate version of the bill, which likely will move to the Senate floor as part of omnibus legislation, would require DOE to site away-from-reactor storage facilities in the 31 states with operating reactors. Alternatively, the bill would allow the department to site regional storage facilities.
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State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
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