Posted on Tue, Aug. 16, 2005
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/12393779.htm

By David Sneed
The Tribune

SACRAMENTO - Communities near California's two nuclear power plants can expect to have hundreds of tons of highly radioactive waste in their midst for decades to come.

Those plants are Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo and San Onofre, north of San Diego.

On Monday, the California Energy Commission received a highly pessimistic report on the likelihood of a central national storage repository for spent nuclear reactor fuel ever opening up in the Nevada desert at Yucca Mountain, north of Las Vegas.

Although Californians have paid more than $1 billion for Yucca Mountain, "uncertainty remains over whether the project will ever be constructed," a report to the commission concluded Monday.

Several speakers on the first of the two-day workshop in Sacramento about the future of nuclear power in California were more blunt.

"No matter how you slice it, Yucca Mountain flunks," said Bob Loux with Nevada's nuclear office.

Paul Craig, a former member of California's Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, said the federal Department of Energy has made so many mistakes in its scientific studies of the site that it has lost its credibility.

"This is a classic example of an organization that is vastly less than the sum of its parts," Craig said of the Energy Department.

The agency was invited to participate in the workshop but declined.

Because of delays at Yucca Mountain, electricity customers will soon be paying hundreds of millions of dollars to store nuclear waste at temporary storage sites that might not be temporary at all.

The fact that spent fuel will likely be stored in large steel-and-concrete casks for decades also raises the possibility that the casks will fail and that nuclear plant operators will have to repackage the spent assemblies in new casks. This would be a complicated and expensive process, Craig said.

Those casks are designed to last for 40 years, but the prospect that Yucca Mountain may never open means the waste could be stored on site at the nuclear plants for hundreds of years.

Steven Kraft, with the nuclear industry advocacy group Nuclear Energy Institute, told the commission that scientific problems with Yucca Mountain can be overcome and the project should move forward.

"Yucca Mountain is an important national priority," he said.

First in 30 years

This week's hearings were the first time in 30 years that the state has taken a comprehensive look at the part of California's utility infrastructure that produces 13 percent of the state's electricity.

Diablo Canyon and San Onofre are California's two operating nuclear power plants. Southern California also gets part of its electricity from the Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona.

These plants were built with the assumption that the federal government would provide a central storage facility for nuclear waste for all of the nation's 103 operating reactors.

However, staunch opposition by the state of Nevada and questions about the reliability of technical studies done of Yucca Mountain have caused numerous delays.

The facility was supposed to open in 1998 but is now expected to open no sooner than 2013, and that date is considered optimistic.

Operators at Diablo Canyon expect to begin transferring its spent fuel from storage pools to aboveground dry casks late in 2007. The casks will be mounted on a thick concrete slab built on a hillside behind the plant.

Eventually, 138 casks will be filled over the next 35 years at a cost of $250 million.

A similar storage facility is planned for San Onofre at a cost of $162 million to Southern California ratepayers.

Rochelle Becker, a San Luis Obispo County woman who is a member of the anti-nuclear group Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, said she wants the federal government to use part of the $1 billion California has paid for Yucca Mountain to make the state's dry cask storage facilities more robust and able to withstand terrorist attacks and earthquakes.

The Utah alternative

The nuclear power industry is planning a temporary alternative to Yucca Mountain. But utilities in California are showing little interest in using it.

The temporary facility is planned for an Indian reservation in Skull Valley, Utah. It could take 4,000 casks, or about as much waste as the nation has generated. This so-called private fuel-storage facility could open in 2007.

Jeff Lewis, Diablo Canyon's spokesman, said that Pacific Gas and Electric Co. would prefer to concentrate its efforts on its own on-site storage facility and wait for a federal repository to open. The power company would prefer not to have to ship its fuel twice, once to Skull Valley and then again to a federal site.