Sixteen utilities and a trade association sued the Energy Department on Monday to halt the government’s collection of nuclear waste disposal fees, arguing that the country no longer had a disposal plan after ruling out Yucca Mountain, Nev., as a repository.
The utilities, which filed the lawsuit in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, jointly pay about $750 million a year — amounting to a tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour — into the fund. It now stands at about $24 billion
nfl jerseys and earns about $1 billion annually in interest.
The money was supposed to pay for the development of the Yucca Mountain repository, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, but the Energy Department said last month that it was formally seeking to withdraw its application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to operate the site.
President Obama had promised while campaigning for office that he would kill the project, in large part at the urging of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, now the majority leader. But it was also far from clear that the site was technically suitable for waste disposal.
A federal advisory commission on a new waste strategy met for the first time last week, but it is focusing on broad issues like choosing a disposal technology, not finding a new site.
Ellen C. Ginsberg, general counsel for the Nuclear Energy Institute, said there was therefore no longer a basis for collecting the fee. The federal energy secretary makes annual estimates called “fee adequacy reports,” based on the cost to build, operate and close up the repository, but there is now no repository to base a cost estimate on, she said.
“Where there is no program being implemented, we don’t want to have to pay for something while there’s no way to determine whether the number is correct or not,” she said.
But an Energy Department spokeswoman, Stephanie Mueller,
Miami Dolphins Jersey countered that the fees were legally mandated and would eventually go to waste disposal. The advisory commission will recommend how the fees should be handled, she added.
The utilities have been paying into the fund since April 1983. On Friday, the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, a Washington-based group that represents members of state public service commissions, said in a court filing that the payments should be stopped. It noted that the money was paid by the utilities, but that ultimately the bill was passed to ratepayers.
Two suits have been filed contesting the Obama administration’s decision to stop work on Yucca.
Under contracts with the utilities, the Energy Department was to begin taking delivery of the fuel in 1998. It has been sued by many of them and has been forced to pay damages, mostly for the utilities’ costs to build additional storage at the reactor sites.
But the waste impasse has gone on so long that in some places, the reactors have been retired and demolished, leaving nothing but small concrete-and-steel silos holding the waste.
Ms. Ginsberg said she hoped that the department would
Miami Dolphins Jersey move that waste to a central location, a step the industry said would reduce costs. But the department argues that the 1982 law under which it collects the waste fees does not permit it to use the money for “interim storage.”