CAGW President Tom Schatz Testifies on Yucca Mountain

(Washington, D.C.) – Today, Tom Schatz, President of Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy in support of the use of the deep geological repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada for the storage of spent nuclear fuel.

To date, through assessments in their utility bills, ratepayers have contributed between $750 and $780 million each year since 1983 into the Nuclear Waste Fund. The Department of Energy (DOE) has spent $15 billion to evaluate various possible sites, to develop Yucca Mountain, and to submit the licensing application, but the national inventory of spent nuclear fuel stands at 65,000 metric tons and not one spent fuel rod has been moved to the Yucca Mountain facility. The spent fuel languishes at 75 sites in 33 states, stored either in cooling pools or, when the pools have reached capacity, in expensive dry cask storage facilities adjacent to operational reactor sites.

On January 29, 2010, when the White House’s top energy adviser, Carol Browner, declared that “The debate over Yucca Mountain is over as the president has made clear…We’re done with Yucca. We need to be looking at other alternatives.” The DOE under the Obama administration moved to terminate the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management and the Yucca Mountain repository project and the President’s fiscal year 2011 budget contained no further funding for the project.

“The saga of Yucca Mountain has been one of gross disregard for the demands of nuclear-generated electricity, which constitutes 20 percent of the electricity generated in the country; for the ratepayers, who have contributed and continue to contribute billions to what was supposed to be a lockbox to build a spent nuclear fuel repository; and to the taxpayers, who will pay for the debacle far into the future,” said Schatz. “Congress and the DOE have squandered not only the money in the trust fund, but also the trust of the ratepayers and the taxpayers. To date, the Treasury Department’s Judgment fund has paid $1.7 billion to settle cases for those utilities which have incurred damages as a result of the DOE’s delays. Termination of the Yucca project poses serious challenges to the funding of any future disposal site.”

According to the Government Accountability Office’s April 2011 report, “If DOE were to pursue an alternate repository – assuming an alternate repository would have costs similar to the Yucca Mountain repository – it is not certain that the fund will have built up a sufficient surplus to site, license, construct, and operate it. DOE makes an annual assessment of the adequacy of the nuclear waste fund to ensure that full costs of a disposal program will be fully recovered.

“As long as the endless discussions continue to persist, tons of nuclear waste will sit in costly piles all over the U.S. The sooner the waste can be moved to an exclusive, government-run site, the sooner taxpayers can stop shouldering unnecessary fees,” added Schatz.

Citizens Against Government Waste is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.