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Shimkus wants to reopen debate on Yucca Mountain nuclear repository

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 25, 2011 - WASHINGTON - Trying to revive the debate on the nearly moribund plan to establish a nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain, U.S. Rep. John Shimkus, R-Collinsville, sent a letter Thursday asking Energy Secretary Steven Chu to explain the decision to pull the plug on the project without a viable alternative.

In the joint letter with Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mi., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Shimkus said that the panel wanted to know why consumers have paid billions of dollars into a nuclear waste fund "only -- so far -- to have received nothing in return." And they demanded an accounting of the damages that the government has had to pay nuclear power plant operators because of the Energy Department's failure to accept and store high-level nuclear waste.

Shimkus told the Beacon last month that re-examining the Yucca Mountain storage option in Nevada was one of his priorities as the new chairman of the Energy and Commerce panel's Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy. He has visited the Yucca site and plans an oversight hearing "on the padlocking of the [Yucca] facility" by the Energy Department. "I think it's questionable that they have the legal authority to do that."

With 11 nuclear reactors in six locations, Illinois has a major investment in nuclear energy, and Shimkus' subcommittee has jurisdiction over nuclear-waste issues. "We need to address the nuclear-waste fund, a fee that's been put on everyone's energy bills for years with the sole purpose of the federal government taking possession of high-level nuclear waste -- which we've failed to do because there is nowhere to put it," he told the Beacon.

The Yucca Mountain site -- proposed two decades ago as the nation's main repository storage facility for spent nuclear reactor fuel and other radioactive waste -- is located about 90 miles from Las Vegas. First approved by Congress as a future repository in 2002, the site encountered so much opposition from environmental groups and Las Vegas residents that the administration of President Barack Obama announced in 2009 that the site was no longer an option for such a repository.

At the time, Chu said that the current "dry-cask" storage of spent nuclear waste at many sites "would be safe for many decades, so that gives us time to figure out what we should do for a long-term strategy." He said the department would name a blue-ribbon panel to look at the issue, with possible solutions including high-energy neutron reactions that would help "burn down the long-lived actinide waste" produced by nuclear plants.

The Energy Department shut down its Yucca program last year and Obama's budget for FY 2012 -- announced earlier this month -- proposed zeroing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's budget for Yucca. But the Republican-controlled U.S. House voted last week, in its catchall spending bill, to direct the NRC to stop is effort to close out the Yucca program. The spending bill is now in the hands of the U.S. Senate.

In their letter to Chu, Upton and Shimkus said they were concerned about the billions of dollars collected from the American public's monthly electric bills for a fund that was supposed to solve the problem of storing the nation's spent nuclear waste. They also said Congress, under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, has "a moral obligation to stop the flow of taxpayer dollars from the U.S. Treasury to pay damages" to the operators of nuclear power plants paying for the temporary storage of nuclear waste.

Signaling the committee's intention to pursue the issue, Upton and Shimkus wrote, "It would be difficult to draft legislation to make the act more plain, specific, and mandatory than it already is."

But whatever action the House takes on Yucca Mountain is likely to hit significant opposition in the Senate because the chief opponent of Yucca is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who made opposition to the repository site a key to his successful reelection campaign last fall.

"Nevada is not the nation's dumping ground and it never will be as long as I have something to say about it," Reid said last fall, calling the Yucca project "ill-conceived from the beginning."

Reid said, "It makes no sense to haul 77,000 tons of the most dangerous substance known to man across the country and into Nevada." He also said Nevada's tourism industry would suffer "just because politicians in other states that produce the waste don't want it in their back yards."

Rob Koenig is an award-winning journalist and author. He worked at the STL Beacon until 2013.