Part II of a series on the spent fuel crisis: Nuclear power plant owners and their ratepayers face intensifying costs for storage of spent fuel now that the Obama administration has tabled plans for a federal dump.
Editor's note: This series is a collaboration between the Hearst Connecticut Media Group and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (www.necir-bu.org), a nonprofit investigative newsroom based at Boston University.
By MAGGIE MULVIHILL, SHAY TOTTEN, and MATT PORTER
New England Center for Investigative Reporting
New England’s electricity consumers and nuclear plant owners have poured close to $1 billion into a federal waste fund for the past three decades, honoring their end of a 1982 bargain with the government to finance the permanent storage of thousands of tons of spent fuel from the region’s reactors.
The payoff?
A cavernous empty $11 billion hole in a Nevada mountainside, a broken promise from the U.S. government to remove the radioactive waste and mounting bills that could still saddle New England with at least five mothballed plants and dozens of dry spent fuel casks, turning communities into mini nuclear waste dumps for decades, if not forever.
“It’s the most expensive dry hole we’ve ever built,” said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and director of the Union of Concerned Scientists Nuclear Safety Project. “Who would trust the government with a dollar after they’ve wasted billions? We’ve messed this up as bad as we possibly could.”
As the nuclear calamity in Japan has resurrected debate about government and industry promises of the energy’s cost effectiveness, a review of regional costs by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and the Hearst Connecticut Media Group has found:
FILE PHOTO – An employee of the Yucca Mountain Project walks through a tunnel inside the project near Mercury, Nev. • New England plants, among the nation’s oldest, have already generated over 4,200 tons of spent fuel, data from the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry policy organization, shows, but the plants have no clear financial plan on how to pay for long-term storage. The spent fuel sits at or near the nine regional reactors in either pools of water or dry cement fortifications known as “dry casks,” which cost between $6 to 8 million annually per plant to secure.
• At least one New England plant is seeking U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval to raid funds set aside to decommission to cover mounting spent fuel costs, raising concerns about its plans to pay for the future dismantling and cleanup costs.
• New England’s continuing federal bill for the waste generated to date tops $2.1 billion, including interest, NEI data shows. Millions more will be needed to house the additional 20 metric tons plants are generating annually.
• Regional plants have a bleak history of underestimating decommissioning costs by hundreds of millions, shifting those unanticipated costs onto taxpayers and ratepayers far into the future.
• Operators or owners of some New England plants have a limited liability corporate structure, meaning taxpayers could be financially responsible for a plant disaster.
• Taxpayers in New England and the rest of the nation have paid out $750 million in settlements or judgments for generator lawsuits against the federal government for defaulting on its promise to remove the spent fuel to Nevada. The U.S. Department of Energy has estimated its potential liability at $13.1 billion, a November 2010, DOE report shows.
The cost bleed is not unique to New England. Plant owners and the ratepayers they charge are grappling with intensifying spent fuel storage bills now that the Obama administration - even as it touts industry expansion - has tabled plans for a federal dump at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.
“The real story here is the failure of the government to remove the fuel,” said David Tarantino, spokesman for the Pilgrim Nuclear Generating Station in Plymouth, whose pools will reach maximum capacity in 2014. “We don’t want to store fuel, but we have to.”
Political opposition has currently sunk the proposal that would have moved, beginning in 1998, up to 70,000 metric tons of waste to the Yucca site 90 miles from Las Vegas.
While safety, not finances, has been at the core of the intense debate about the industry following the Japan calamity in March, analysts, anti-nuclear activists, New England politicians and even plant operators said the cost issue sorely needs public attention.
“If a nuclear renaissance were to take place - if it were not just a figment of wishful thinking - we would need another Yucca Mountain every few years,” said Ray Shadis, a Maine environmentalist and anti-nuclear activist. “When you grasp the scale of what is proposed, the cost is astronomically high and I don’t know that in the public debate that is really being considered.”
As the question of whether nuclear energy will ever be affordable is debated, the federal government continues to spend money to support it on a vast scale. To date, $11 billion has been spent to excavate and prepare the now-abandoned Yucca site, leaving about $20 billion in the fund, industry experts said.
It could cost $10 billion to find another site and prepare it if Yucca is canceled, said Arnold Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates, an industry consultant and former licensed nuclear operator based in Vermont.
Beyond the unexpected storage costs, taxpayers and ratepayers could also be on the hook for billions in additional costs ranging from proposed federal subsidies and loans, as well as the possibility owners won’t have enough money to decommission the plants and clean up the hazardous sites.
At least one New England plant is seeking an exemption from federal law that would allow it to use its decommissioning fund to pay for storage costs.
Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant as seen from the Hinsdale, N.H., side of the Connecticut River.Vermont Yankee - whose fund is already short millions - wants the NRC to allow them to use the money to pay for fuel storage, according to a 2008 plan it filed with the agency.
In 2009, the NRC required Entergy Nuclear Operations Inc., which owns Vermont Yankee, a limited liability corporation, to put up a $40 million loan guarantee because its decommissioning funds are off track, said NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan
In its NRC proposal, Entergy estimated it would need about $220 million - about half the current fund - to deal with spent fuel, seeking permission to draw from the decommissioning fund built up with ratepayer money.
“Entergy VT will periodically revisit the cash contribution required for the decommissioning fund to ensure that spent fuel management withdrawals would not inhibit the ability of the licensee to complete radiological decommissioning,” the proposal states.
The NRC can’t act on the proposal until decommissioning begins.
Because of the limited liability corporate structure of some New England plants, like Vermont Yankee, and Seabrook in New Hampshire, industry critics worry the public will have to pick up the tab to clean up sites if the firms go bankrupt.
“Decommissioning is a real problem in New England,” said Gundersen.
NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan disagrees.
“The corporation would not be off the hook. We could always go after the parent company, “Sheehan said.
Still, history is not on the side of New England plant operators when it comes to properly estimating decommissioning costs.
“The colossal failure of nuclear power is really seen in decommissioning,” said Deborah Katz, who runs the Massachusetts-based Citizens Awareness Network, an anti-nuclear group.
“When you have to engage in cleanup, then this notion of being a clean, technologically advanced form of generating power is really put to the test. These are basically nuclear pigsties,” Katz said.
A 2006 audit by the NRC’s own internal financial watchdog found in a review of 13 nuclear plants that the actual on-site estimate to decommission was 16 percent higher than was what set aside in funds.
“What they have found at these sites again and again is there has been an underestimation by hundreds of millions of dollars of what it will cost,” Katz said. “That is why the investment community won’t get behind new reactors. They have no faith in what it is going to cost.”
View full sizeTop photo shows the Yankee Rowe nuclear power plant in Rowe before demolition began. Below, the former site of the plant after it was decommissioned and removed.The estimated cost to decommission Yankee Rowe in Rowe was $306 million in 1995 dollars. The actual costs were $600 million, a company report states.
Decommissioning was completed in 2007.
Similar problems occurred in Maine and Connecticut.
Connecticut ratepayers will contribute to Yankee Connecticut’s decommissioning costs until 2015 because the NRC and Yankee underestimated the cleanup costs by about $300 million, plant critics said.
“It wound up costing a billion to decontaminate Connecticut Yankee,” Gundersen said. “All of the ratepayers in Connecticut got nailed for 10 years to pay that off.”
Yankee spokesman Bob Capstick put the decommissioning cost closer to $800 million. He said plant owners will return funds to ratepayers if they are successful in their lawsuits against the government for the fuel storage bills.
Both the NRC and New England plant owners said they are on target to pay the decommissioning bills.
Ken Holt, a spokesman for Dominion Resources Inc., which owns the Connecticut plants, known as Millstone 2 and 3, said it has about half of what it expects it will need to dismantle the two plants in 2035 and 2045 respectively, when their licenses expire, and any shortfall won’t fall on ratepayers.
“The company is responsible for making up any difference in the funds to decommission the unit,” he said.
Sheehan said the NRC has changed the decommissioning formula to make sure owners are on track. Funds must gain 2 percent annually and be invested in conservative financial vehicles to ensure dependable growth.
Plants without the funds can “mothball” the plant for up to 60 years - a process known as SAFESTOR - to give them time to finance decommissioning, he said.
The public’s contributions are far from reaping the promised benefit of affordable, clean energy to consumers, according to a February report by the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge.
“Government subsidies to the nuclear power industry over the past 50 years have been so large in proportion to the value of the energy produced that in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy kilowatts on the open market and give them away,” the report summary states.
And after 40 years of operation, the plants still can’t stand on their own financial footing, the Union of Concerned Scientist’s report states.
“The financial story is that nuclear power is not viable without subsidies,” said Ellen Vancko, who runs UCS’s nuclear energy division. “The waste issue is just one example.”
New England politicians continue to raise the fairness of the public tab. Last year, U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., asked the General Accounting Office to review the NRC’s oversight of plants, in part because of the industry’s history of fiscal problems.
In a March 18 letter to President Obama, U.S. Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., asked the administration to revisit both a federal law providing taxpayer subsidized insurance to the nuclear industry as well as giving federally backed loans to build new plants.
Congress has authorized $18.5 billion in existing loan guarantees authority to new nuclear plants, and the Obama Administration, in its budget proposal, has asked for another $36 billion to expand the nuclear power industry.
“Independent analysis suggests that new nuclear power is more expensive than nearly every other energy source, including solar, wind, biomass and geothermal energy,” Sanders wrote. “Given that reality, I cannot understand why we would continue to pour massive taxpayer subsidies into nuclear power.”
The Yucca debacle has opened up a financial chasm that will take decades to resolve, industry critics said.
“We are taxing our grandchildren. Capitalism kicks these liabilities down the road, so we are kicking the can down the road,” Gundersen said. “We get the benefit while our grandchildren get the liability.”