Don't Waste America - Oppose The Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1999

June 25, 1999

Dear Senator:

On behalf of our combined memberships nationwide, our organizations oppose the nuclear waste legislation recently reported out of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, entitled the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1999. We urge you to protect our nation’s environment by voting against this bill. It would endanger the public’s health and safety, compromise our nation’s nuclear non-proliferation policies of the past 20 years, and place more of the burden of nuclear waste disposition directly on the taxpayer.

High-level nuclear waste will remain hazardous for a quarter of a million years, yet this legislation would increase the risk these toxins pose to the public. The bill severely weakens environmental standards for nuclear waste disposal by carving loopholes in the licensing standards for a permanent repository and forbidding the Environmental Protection Agency from issuing radiation release standards to protect the public. 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.

While previous bills’ interim storage provisions have been deleted, the legislation does permit interim storage in another form. Backup storage capacity, as it is now called, is possible at either Yucca Mountain, Nevada after 2007 or at a NRC licensed private waste dump. Several such 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.

Nuclear utilities want to move the waste out of their backyards for purely political and public relations reasons. Despite a delay in timing, the legislation continues to mandate the greatest nuclear waste transportation project in human history. Ninety-five percent of the nation's radioactive waste would hit the road. Fifty million Americans in 43 states could wake up to find radioactive waste transported along their local railroads and highways.

If you vote to unnecessarily ship radioactive waste, accidents will most certainly happen. The Department of Energy has projected the impact of an accident leading to a small release of radioactive material (1380 curies) in a rural area. Such an accident would contaminate a 42 square-mile area that will require 460 days and cost $620 million to clean up. In a similar vein, Department of Transportation records indicate that in a 10-year period there were almost 100,000 transport accidents releasing hazardous materials. These accidents caused 4305 minor injuries, 356 major injuries and 114 deaths that resulted in $317,523,997 in damages.

In addition to the above concerns, serious nuclear 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.

Finally, the legislation is fiscally irresponsible. The bill adds new burdens to the Nuclear Waste Fund. It pays for a substantial portion of onsite storage at reactors, while simultaneously restricting an increase in the Nuclear Waste Fund revenues. Several independent studies have predicted that the Nuclear Waste Fund will be inadequate. The legislation thus would virtually guarantee that taxpayers would have to pay for nuclear waste storage, which under current law is and should remain the responsibility of the waste generators.

This bill’s proposal for assuming ownership and liability of nuclear waste is unacceptable. Taxpayer assumption of liability for high-level nuclear waste allows those who profited from creation of the waste to avoid the costs of disposition. This violates the polluter pays principal.

Supporters of this legislation are correct when they note that radioactive waste policy in the U.S. has been a failure. Irrational classifications and unrealistic timetables have left the public without confidence in the current system. Mounting evidence that Yucca Mountain may be unsuitable has beset the site characterization process. The evidence includes hundreds of earthquakes, volcanic activity, fast moving rainwater and erratic groundwater levels. To counter these setbacks, industry pressure has created an aura of political expediency to change the scientific basis for evaluating Yucca Mountain. This site is the only candidate for a permanent repository for high-level nuclear waste therefore the need for scientific credibility is essential.