Utilities Offer Energy Dept. Site for Waste

March 20, 2006
Utilities Offer Energy Dept. Site for Waste
By MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON, March 19 — A group of nuclear utilities that is planning to build a private nuclear waste dump on an Indian reservation in Utah has offered to sell space there to the federal government. The move could help the government avoid billions of dollars in potential legal damages over its failure to build its own repository.

This month the utilities, eight companies from around the country, won a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to open a repository at Skull Valley, on land leased on a Goshute Indian reservation, about 60 miles west of Salt Lake City.

The utility consortium, called Private Fuel Storage, does not have the permits it needs to transport waste to the site, however, and the State of Utah is trying to block those.

The Energy Department signed contracts in the 1980's with each of the nuclear operators, promising to accept their spent fuel beginning in January 1998, in exchange for a payment of a tenth of a cent for each kilowatt-hour they generated.

The project now appears to be at least 20 years behind schedule, and the department faces approximately $50 billion in damage claims from the utilities, many of which have resorted to building giant casks adjacent to their reactors to store the old fuel....>

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/politics/20waste.html?_r=1&oref=slogin