The $38 billion nuclear waste fiasco

[AdamSmith]

Update on the ongoing Yucca Mountain follies.

The $38 billion nuclear waste fiasco

Congress chose the site in 1987 as the country’s sole permanent nuclear repository. | AP Photo

By DARIUS DIXON | 11/30/13 12:29 PM EST

politico.com

Doing nothing often has a cost — and when it comes to storing the nation’s nuclear waste, the price is $38 billion and rising.

That’s just the low-ball estimate for how much taxpayers will wind up spending because of the government’s decades of dithering about how to handle the radioactive leftovers sitting at dozens of sites in 38 states. The final price will be higher unless the government starts collecting the waste by 2020, which almost nobody who tracks the issue expects.

The first $15 billion is what the government spent on a controversial nuclear waste repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain until the Obama administration scrapped the project. The other $23 billion is the Energy Department’s estimate of the damages the government will have to pay to nuclear power utilities, which for the past 30 years have paid a fee to DOE on the promise that the feds would begin collecting their waste in 1998.

Industry argues that the damages are closer to $50 billion — which raises the bottom line to $65 billion including the money spent on Yucca.

The cost of the refunds is little known to the public, but it’s such a huge liability that DOE tracks the figure closely. The government is still fighting the utilities’ claims in court, but utilities have been racking up a string of wins.

The costs of inaction don’t just include dollars. The lack of a final resting place for the waste means that each nuclear plant has to stockpile its own. Thousands of tons of waste are stranded at sites around the country, including at plants that have shut down.

“I’m trying to think of some fancy words but at the end of the day it’s just a massive consumer rip-off,” said Greg White, a regulator on the Michigan Public Service Commission who also heads the nuclear waste panel for the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. NARUC, which represents state-level regulators, won a legal victory this month when the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered DOE to stop collecting the fee.

Salo Zelermyer, a former George W. Bush-era DOE attorney who works at the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani, says the waste program has “plainly broken down” and that the government had made “no discernable progress towards its commitments.”

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz also expressed frustration this month, calling the system of storing nuclear waste at reactors sites “politically unsustainable.”

“For nuclear energy to be competitive here in the U.S. and ensure its safety and security abroad, we have to address the problem of disposition of used nuclear fuel and high-level waste,” Moniz said during a panel discussion at an American Nuclear Society meeting. He previously served on a blue-ribbon commission that advised Obama on changes to the nation’s nuclear waste policy.

But like others in the Obama administration, Moniz maintains that Yucca Mountain is not “a workable option.”

Congress chose the Nevada site in 1987 as the country’s sole permanent nuclear repository, but it continues to draw fierce opposition from many of the state’s residents and elected officials. One of its most powerful opponents is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who blocked funding for the project and pushed the Obama administration to kill it — something DOE did in 2010.

Reid and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) have long argued that the studies supporting the project were discredited because Congress short-circuited the site-selection process to focus solely on Yucca. The administration says the government needs to start over with a new waste site — and this time, the selection process must be “consent based” to win public acceptance.

“When this Administration took office, the timeline for opening Yucca Mountain had already been pushed back by two decades, stalled by public protest and legal opposition, with no end in sight,” DOE spokeswoman Niketa Kumar said in an email.

The end is still far off. DOE’s latest plan calls for a repository to open in 2048, although the department would try to open a temporary storage site by 2021. Even Yucca couldn’t be finished until at least 2027 if the government were to revive it immediately, the Government Accountability Office estimated last year.

Meanwhile, DOE’s Nuclear Waste Fund has amassed more than $25 billion after utilities — and their customers — have paid $750 million a year since 1983 through a 0.1-cent charge for each nuclear-generated kilowatt-hour of electricity. The fund will continue to generate about $1 billion in interest each year, even though the appeals court zeroed out DOE’s further collection of the fee until Congress passes a new nuclear waste program or the agency dusts off Yucca Mountain.

When it became clear DOE wasn’t fulfilling its end of the bargain, utilities began demanding that the government repay them for the costs they’ve incurred to store the waste on their own. They include the costs for reconfiguring the increasingly crowded spent-fuel pools, moving and packaging the used fuel rods and providing maintenance services such as on-site security.

Utilities have filed at least 61 lawsuits in the past 15 years over the broken promise. And bills have ramped up quickly.

Payments to utilities totaled $567 million by the end of September 2009, during Obama’s first year in office. Three years later, they amount to more than $2.6 billion, according to DOE financial reports.

The Justice Department is pushing back hard against the utilities, but one lawyer who follows the cases said DOJ is no longer using the “scorched earth” approach it once had. The lawyer said that’s mainly because courts have agreed with many of the utilities’ claims, giving government attorneys fewer legal options to stanch the flow of cash.

In another win for the utility side, the Court of Federal Claims on Nov. 14 ordered Treasury to pay $235 million to the owners of three decommissioned nuclear plants in the Northeast — Yankee, Maine Yankee and Connecticut Yankee — on top of a $160 million payment they extracted in February. Those sums cover the utilities’ expenses only through 2008.

The costs for storing waste at plants with longer lifespans will undoubtedly be even higher because the utilities will have to move more spent fuel from cooling pools into longer-term dry casks. Each cask costs about $1 million plus handling.

Seeking to head off future payments, the government has made some little-noticed changes to DOE’s waste contract with companies building new power reactors.

Southern Co. and SCANA, which are building four reactors in Georgia and South Carolina respectively, essentially had to give up the major leverage points that power companies historically used to sue the government over waste storage. The new contract has a more flexible waste pickup schedule, limits the kinds of costs DOE is willing to compensate utilities for and caps certain damage claims.

Still, Moniz said this summer that DOE projects the damages will total as much as $23 billion in the next 50 years — assuming the government can haul the waste to either a temporary or permanent site beginning in 2020. Just two years ago, DOE’s estimate was $15 billion.

After 2020, the federal government will hand over an average of $500 million a year as a result of the lawsuits.

The real twist of the knife for some DOE critics is that the agency doesn’t supply the money it’s losing in nuclear waste lawsuits. Payments to utilities are coming from every taxpayer through an indefinite Treasury account that pays for general litigation against the government. Some critics say this has amounted to a double tax for taxpayers who also happen to get their power from a nuclear plant.

DOE has continued to justify the fee based on its latest nuclear waste strategy — the one that envisions opening a repository in 2048. But the appeals court mocked the agency’s defense and called some of DOE’s positions “obviously disingenuous.”

DOE’s new plan came partly from the recommendations of the 15-member panel that Moniz participated in, which was led by former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Critics like White say they respect the commission’s work but doubt the administration’s sincerity.

“I’m not convinced, right at the moment, that the Department of Energy, under this current administration, has any interest in doing anything related to this program,” White said. “They’re basically biding time until the current president is no longer in office.”

Meanwhile, attempted fixes in Congress have moved at a snail’s pace.

Two years ago, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, introduced a bill with Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) to fast-track the approval of interim storage sites by offering large financial incentives for the communities hosting them. But the sizable price tag would have been peanuts compared with the liability taxpayers are facing.

Since then, Murkowski has worked with Senate energy panel Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to address the price tag while acknowledging the political reality of Reid’s opposition to Yucca. But their bill has stalled this year amid other congressional crises.

“Sen. Murkowski still believes that Yucca should still be on the table and that a permanent repository is necessary,” said her spokesman Robert Dillon. “But in the interim, while there are political roadblocks to that, that doesn’t mean you quit working on the liability issue.”

Their legislation would create a new agency to handle nuclear waste and allow it to set up temporary storage locations, while requiring utilities to settle their lawsuits against the government in exchange using the storage sites.

Former South Carolina regulator David Wright objected to that tradeoff. Forcing utilities to settle would “perpetuate the untenable situation of prolonged on-site dry cask storage,” he wrote the energy committee.

White also found the requirement hard to swallow, saying it could damage hopes for DOE to act on a permanent repository. “If utilities have to waive their rights to damage claims then where is there any kind of impetus for the department to do anything?” he asked.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/nuclear-waste-fiasco-100450.html

[RA1]

I guess radioactive pork doesn't taste so good.

Best regards,

RA1

[TampaYankee]

There are some things that democracy just doesn't do well. One of those is delivering bad news to one's constituents or in this case nuclear waste. No one wants it in their back yard. What's new? Ask any prospective neighborhood if $38 billion is too much to waste to avoid it being dumped in their back yard.

We piss and moan about waste and with good reason but we also piss and moan about other things too. In the end it usually comes down to trades and, all else being equal, the scales usually tilt towards those with skin in the game as opposed those without it.

[MsGuy]

"cooling pools" Aren't those one of the things that have been giving the Japanese fits? Something about spent rods wanting to melt down/catch fire if the constant replenishment of their water is interrupted?

And "dry cast" storage.

AS, didn't you tell me something once about how, after a few years, the stuff in them brews itself into some kind of vile radioactive gunk from hell and starts eating its way out ( to the surprise of the experts)?

[AdamSmith]

AS, didn't you tell me something once about how, after a few years, the stuff in them brews itself into some kind of vile radioactive gunk from hell and starts eating its way out ( to the surprise of the experts)?

That was what a Bechtel person told me about the Hanford tanks. Not exactly a surprise to them, but still an extreme vexation.

The spent uranium and the other fission products mixed in with it are not just radioactive but also highly chemically reactive, on account of having huge electron shells to go with their large atomic number. Sitting in water, warmed by their own heat, has driven chains of chemical reactions over the decades that are proving very hard to characterize now. Thus the difficulties in devising methods of vitrification or other very-long-term stabilization techniques that we can be sure the nasty stuff won't eat its way out of. Not to mention its already leaking out of those tanks, which were never designed for the 60+ years they've been in service now.

One might hope the situation in the commercial power industry wouldn't be quite as bad as in the get-'er-done damn-the-consequences military weapons complex, though I have no knowledge one way or the other.

[MsGuy]

I just love it when you talk all scientific like that,AS. Gives me a hard on.

[AdamSmith]

I just love it when you talk all scientific like that,AS. Gives me a hard on.

Dear Sir:

The locus of the contravariant tensor has noncommutative divergence in the region of the transfinite singularity. A simple extension of your theory leads at once to the obviously fallacious conclusion that the polarized proton flux will result in a heuristic phase imbalance of the hypergeometric catenary, so that...

The standard nonsense reply that Arthur Clarke would send whenever some crackpot mailed him their "solution" to some scientific problem.

[MsGuy]

That's it, baby...

give it to me hard.

[AdamSmith]

I did the Clarke bit from memory, BTW.

A decent memory is handy cover for not being that smart.

[RA1]

I think they go hand in hand or is that dick in hand?

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

give it to me hard.

If you liked that ... some uber-nerd actually tried to figure out a meaning for Clarke's gibberish!

Michael Butler wrote

> But Arthur C. Clarke has already told us that the locus of the

> contravariant tensor has noncommutative divergence in the region of the

> transfinite singularity!

As an exercise, I thought I'd try to find a meaning for the

purportedly meaningless part of that sentence.

Working backwards, the first stumbling block is "transfinite

singularity". This is presumably a singularity in some function.

The question is: in what sense is it "transfinite"?

The function might be transfinite-valued at this point,

or the singularity might be located in a transfinite region

of the function's domain (the set of values for which the

function is defined). Consider, for example, the function x^2.

It is defined for transfinite ordinals like omega just as

much as it is for finite numbers. (For those who haven't

run across it, omega is the first number that comes after

all the finite numbers 1, 2, 3,... After omega come

omega+1, omega+2, ... 2*omega, 2*omega+1, ..., "and so on".)

An example of a function with a transfinite singularity,

in the second sense, is f(x) = 1/(x-omega), which is

singular at x=omega.

The next stumbling block is "noncommutative divergence".

Commutativity is the property that a.b = b.a, something

that's true when "." is multiplication and a and b are

integers, but not true when a and b are rotations of

neighboring Rubik's cube faces and "." means "followed by";

it's one of the basic properties by which one might seek

to characterize an abstract algebra. Divergence can

mean the opposite of convergence, but it also refers

to a quantity in vector mechanics, and this seems the

most sensible interpretation. Let's assume that we're

interested in the divergence of some field in this

second sense. Then what is it that the divergence does not

commute with? Perhaps the divergence takes values in a

noncommutative algebra in this region? But I find it hard to

see why the divergence wouldn't then take values from that

same algebra everywhere else.

So the main problem here is to give a nontrivial meaning to

the notion of "noncommutative divergence". One way out

is to assume that by "noncommutative" we mean not commuting

with a *particular element* of the algebra of divergence values.

Since we are apparently dealing with tensor quantities

this is no great mystery - most matrices do not commute.

The final stumbling block is that it is the *locus* which

is said to have a "divergence". A locus is a region, so

we might suppose that when we talk about the divergence

of the locus, we are integrating divergence across the

locus. But what do we mean by *the* locus of the

contravariant tensor? The expression "the locus of X"

normally would mean "the region in which X can be

found". But then we would be saying "the divergence

of the region is noncommutative in a particular region",

which does not make obvious sense. Therefore we are

probably using the term "locus" as a shorthand for

some already introduced expression, for example

"locus of points for which ... has the same value

as it does at the current point".

So the complete translation of our original statement

might run:

"But Arthur C. Clarke has already told us that the

integral of the divergence of the contravariant tensor

(over a constant-valued neighborhood of the point we

are considering), in the region of the transfinite

singularity, does not commute with e (where e is

some privileged element of the divergence algebra)!"

Constructing a function for which this is true,

and a context in which it makes sense to point all

this out, is left as an exercise for the reader.

http://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.4Q97/0593.html

[MsGuy]

Exploring a bit further along the chain of posts at the extropian blog you cite, AS, I found:

"In the paper today- British scientists have created headless frogs,
and believe the technique could be used to create headless human
clones for the purposes of organ transplants. Cool."

Apparently believed to get around legal &/or ethical objections to cultivating human clones for spare parts.

Science marches on!

[AdamSmith]

This has been speculated about before. They should get on with it! Few things would be more convenient than a spare copy of oneself standing by to supply a compatible heart, kidney or whatever.

Technically though it seems you would want a head, containing the brain stem to regulate the autonomic functions like heartbeat and breathing, but minus the cerebrum.

[MsGuy]

Quite right, AS. Glad to hear you have no irrational aversions toward this magnificent scientific advance.

But my understanding is that many organs don't develop properly unless exercised regularly (muscles, bones, connective tissues, probably heart and others), so we might want a bit more CNS tissue than just a brain stem. Just enough that the clones can move about and keep the body in tone.

And no doubt much expense could be saved if the clone could at least ingest nourishment and keep itself clean, so lets add a teensy bit of cerebral tissue to take care of all that.

And since the damn things will be capable of simple tasks and are running up bills while standing around waiting for organs to be harvested, perhaps they could be rented out to generate some cash flow. Waste not, want not, you know.

It evens occures to me that, if the generative organs were made fully functional, certain posters here at BoyToy.com might even find clones an adequate substitute for garatos and the like.

AdamSmith contemplates employment possibilities for his pinhead clone.

[AdamSmith]

I like a progressive thinker.

But you stopped short: imagine the possibilities of running them for elective office.

[RA1]

Great. A new name for pols. Clones. Wait. Are there not two such branches of such now?

Best regards,

RA1

[MsGuy]

Wrong, both of you!

Zippy was born (decocted?) thoroughly non-partisan.