Copyright 1999 Star Tribune
Star Tribune
(Minneapolis, MN)
November 10, 1999, Wednesday, Metro Edition
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 12A
LENGTH: 692 words
HEADLINE:
Senate delays debate on nuclear waste;
The issue over the storage of spent
fuel won't be addressed until early next year. NSP officials say they'll press
for a different bill.
BYLINE: Greg Gordon; Staff Writer
DATELINE: Washington, D.C.
BODY:
Stalled by filibuster threats, the chairman
of the Senate Energy Committee said Tuesday that the Senate will recess this
month without addressing the nuclear power industry's demand for a place to put
its deadly waste.
"It's not going to come up [on the
Senate floor] in the time that we have left," said Sen. Frank Murkowski,
R-Alaska.
Ironically, the delay until early next year
does not entirely upset executives of Northern States Power Co., whose Prairie
Island facility is scheduled in 2007 to become the first nuclear plant to run
out of storage space for its spent fuel.
NSP, which
has spent years lobbying for a nuclear waste facility, now is siding with
Murkowski's opponents, distressed that his bill would not require the government
to open a temporary disposal site. Tom Weaver, NSP's director
of state and federal relations, said Murkowski's revised measure includes no
guarantee that a federal disposal facility would be operating by NSP's 2007
deadline. If the legislation were adopted, Weaver said, it could mean the
twin-reactor, 1,070-megawatt Prairie Island plant in Red Wing, Minn., would be
forced to close years prematurely.
"It's very
frustrating for us because we've got really the only plant in the nation that's
faced with a fairly immediate shutdown," Weaver said. "The bill . . . doesn't
address the one real problem that's out there."
Weaver
said NSP would press ahead with other options, including its effort with seven
other utilities to win Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approval to operate a
private storage facility on the reservation of Utah's Skull Valley band of
Goshute Indians. NSP also may try to strike a deal under which another nuclear
facility would temporarily store Prairie Island waste, Weaver said.
The latest Senate delay underscores the difficulty of
finding consensus on the issue, even two years after the government breached a
contractual commitment to begin accepting the commercial industry's waste.
NSP prefers a bill that overwhelmingly passed the
House earlier this year. It would require the opening of an interim disposal
facility in 2003 at the Nevada Test Site, not far from Yucca
Mountain, where the Energy Department hopes to build a permanent
repository.
Murkowski said NSP would be better off
with his bill than without it because it would allow the shipment of waste to
Yucca Mountain as soon as the permanent repository is licensed,
probably by 2007.
He said his version is a compromise
attempt aimed at persuading President Clinton to abandon a veto threat. The bill
adapts a proposal of Energy Secretary Bill Richardson's that gives nuclear
utilities the option of transferring to the federal government the title to the
excess waste stored outside 81 plants in 33 states.
Minnesota Commerce Commissioner Steve Minn called that
provision "the most heinous part of the bill," saying the waste could remain at
the plants indefinitely. Minnesota electric ratepayers, he said, have paid
$300 million, including interest, into a federal Nuclear Waste
Fund.
Murkowski's bill also faces opposition from
Nevada's two senators, whose Oct. 29 filibuster threat prompted Republican
leaders to set the matter aside so it would not interfere with session-ending
Senate business.
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who said he
has the 34 votes needed to sustain a presidential veto, objects to Murkowski's
bill because it shifts the authority to set the ground-water-radiation standard
at the Yucca Mountain site from the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) to the NRC.
Reid said that would
result in "the fox guarding the hen house . . . When in the world do we have the
NRC determining environmental standards?"
Murkowski
said, however, that he fears that the EPA would kill the decade-old,
multibillion-dollar Yucca Mountain project by setting an
"unattainable" radiation-exposure threshold equivalent to its drinking water
standard of one tenth of a millirem per year. The NRC would set a standard of 25
to 30 millirems, below Nevada's standard of 100 millirems, he said.
LOAD-DATE: November 10, 1999
