Nuclear Waste Legislation Update

28 June 1999

Congress is busy working on nuclear waste legislation. Bills have gained Committee approval and may be voted on by both the House and Senate. There have been substantial changes from previous versions of this legislation, but both the House and Senate proposals are anti-public health and safety, anti-environment, anti-democracy, and simply versions of the same old story of serving the needs of the nuclear power industry.

Status and next expected action:

House: H.R. 45 (Upton, R-MI and Townes D-NY) was modified by Representative Barton (R-TX), Chair of the Subcommitee on Energy and Power and approved by the full Commerce Committee in April. We believe House leadership will wait to bring the House bill to the Floor for a vote until after the Senate concludes their debate on this issue.

Senate: A new nuclear waste bill was approved by the Senate Energy Committee last week. We will post the bill number in an upcoming Action Alert. For now, it is entitled the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1999 sponsored by Senator Murkowski (R-AK), Chair of the Senate Energy Committee.

The bill is a departure from Murkowski's previous S 608, but support is still split almost evenly along party lines. The Senate has, for the past 4 years provided the necessary votes to sustain the veto which President Clinton has threatened each year. We believe this bill may go to the Senate Floor in July. We are confident that President Clinton will veto this bill in its current form.

DISCUSSION: Senator Murkowski's "Compromise" is still not responsible nuclear waste policy

The bill approved by the Senate Energy Committee would continue the interim storage of high-level nuclear waste at reactor sites where the waste is produced. The federal government (DOE) will take title and assume liability for the waste including all storage costs. This payoff to the nuclear industry is offered in exchange for settlement of the current legal challenges resulting from the 1998 deadline forcing DOE to start taking the waste away to a repository. Alternately, the DOE might compensate utilities for their storage costs if the utility prefers to retain title and handle the storage.

One way to look at this is that we have basically won on the issue of centralized interim storage. When we all took up this fight in 1994, the date for operation of a "temporary" dump next to Yucca Mountain was 1998. It is 1999 and centralized interim storage is now off the table.

Congratulations to all who have helped generate pressure on your Members of Congress.

The new legislation would:

- permit interim storage in another form called backup storage capacity. This interim storage may be located at either Yucca Mountain, Nevada after 2007 or at a NRC licensed private waste dump. Several such private storage sites are currently under review. The site nearest to being licensed is located in Utah. If NRC determines that a utility cannot continue to store additional nuclear waste onsite, the DOE is required to take title to this waste and transport it to any of these so-called temporary dumps.

- under today's law, EPA is mandated to establish public radiation safety standards which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission then requires the DOE to meet. The new bill prohibits EPA from setting radiation safety standards. Instead the bill requires NRC to set a radiation safety standard using severly weakened criteria. The bill forces the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to set the critical radiation release standard equal to 1 excess cancer death for every 1,000 individuals exposed to radiation from Yucca Mountain.

Such a standard is unconscionable. Other federal health standards typically permit only 1 excess cancer death for every 100,000 to 1,000,000 exposed individuals. Furthermore, this standard is only applied for the first 10,000 years of the permanent dump, well short of the quarter of a million years required. In addition, the bill prohibits the application of ground water safety standards equivelent to the Safe Drinking Water Act.

- serious proliferation concerns are raised by Title III, Development of National Nuclear Spent Fuel Strategy, which establishes a new "Office of Spent Nuclear Fuel Research." The office would be tasked with research and development of "promising technologies for the treatment, recycling and disposal" of nuclear waste, including reprocessing and recycling of plutonium. This would be a flagrant violation of U.S. non-proliferation policy, which does not support reprocessing and seeks to reduce stockpiles of separated plutonium. The office would also perform research and development on both accelerator and reactor-based transmutation. The National Academy of Sciences has raised grave doubts about this technology and the costs of such a program have been placed as high as $39 billion. The pyroprocessing technology, that would be used to prepare commercial radioactive waste for transmutation, also poses a serious proliferation threat. According to DOE's own analysis, this technology could be easily adapted to separate plutonium from the waste stream.

Taken together,the provisions of the bill roll back the few remaining protections in today's law that might prevent the mistake of putting the vast majority of our nuclear waste in a leaking hole at Yucca Mountain.

This is not responsible nuclear waste policy.

We will keep you posted as things develop and will alert you to any action required on your part.

Thank you for your ongoing support of our efforts to defeat this dangerous legislation.

Return to the Critical Mass Energy Project website: http://www.citizen.org/cmep