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“THE INTEGRATED SPENT FUEL MANAGEMENT ACT OF 1995” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Energy was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E429-E430 on Feb. 24, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE INTEGRATED SPENT FUEL MANAGEMENT ACT OF 1995
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HON. FRED UPTON
of michigan
in the house of representatives
Friday, February 24, 1995
Mr. UPTON. Mr. Speaker, yesterday I introduced the Integrated Spent Nuclear Fuel Management Act of 1995. This is comprehensive legislation designed to address our national problem with high-level nuclear waste by providing workable solutions for managing used nuclear fuel from America's commercial nuclear powerplants.
Nuclear powerplants currently provide more than 20 percent of America's electricity. They do so by harnessing the heat from uranium filled fuel rods to produce steam that turns electric turbines. When the energy in these fuel rods is depleted, the rods are removed from the reactor's core and placed in pools of water.
Where they go next is the focus of this legislation. In Sweden, used fuel rods will eventually go directly to underground storage. In France, the rods are chopped up; the radioactive materials within them are separated and then reprocessed into new fuel rods. These completely different approaches meet both the energy and the environmental needs of their respective countries.
In America, spent fuel rods go nowhere because there is nowhere for them to go. This eliptical sentence accurately describes the nexus of our peculiar problem with nuclear waste: We have been producing thousands of tons of post-reactor wastes over a period of decades without providing a place for their ultimate disposal. The wastes from over 100 nuclear powerplants have accumulated and continue accumulating at 70 sites in more than 30 States.
Nuclear wastes didn't come as a surprise problem like DDT or ozone depleting compounds. We have known from the earliest days of the nuclear era that spent fuel and other nuclear wastes would need the most careful attention. In those early days, however,
[[Page E430]] planners foresaw a different nuclear cycle or system than the one we now have. They envisioned many more nuclear power plants than exist today, enough to warrant an enormous reprocessing system similar to but larger than the system currently operating in France.
For reasons that I won't go into today, this reprocessing sector did not develop in this country. Rather than following the French reprocessing model, we are now pursuing the once through Swedish approach. This means a home must be found for thousands and thousands of highly radioactive fuel rods.
It was assumed from the outset that the Federal Government would be responsible for these wastes and that some Federal entity would construct and operate the facilities this obligation would require. This assumption became law 13 years ago, with passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.
The 1982 act set up a nuclear waste trust fund which was and is funded from a special fee on nuclear generated electricity. The fund was established to pay for a Federal nuclear waste repository. The Department of Energy was to begin accepting nuclear waste by January 31, 1998.
Despite the passage of the 1982 act and significant amendments to it in 1987 and the passage of 13 years, the Department of Energy has made little progress toward construction of a repository. The Department announced last year that it could not foresee completion of a repository any earlier than 2010, 16 years hence. Thus, Mr. Speaker, the repository that was 16 years away in 1982 is still 16 years away and half the $10 billion paid into the nuclear waste fund by electricity consumers has been spent.
We have talked at length in this Congress about unfunded mandates, but this is a prime example of a funded mandate that the Federal Government has not honored. Small wonder that the Department's announcement generated great consternation among public utilities
and utility regulators and two separate lawsuits against the Secretary of Energy. Consumers and electric utilities have upheld their end of the 1982 agreement. It's time for the Government to honor its side of the bargain.
Much time has been lost. Much criticism has been directed at the Department of Energy for its failure to achieve the 1982 act's objectives. I will not add to this criticism. As is so often the case in ambitious Federal programs, we have asked good people to do something or to build something that has never been done or built before.
As much as we may appreciate the difficulty of the task, however, I cannot accept the Department's assertion that it ``does not have a clear legal obligation under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to accept spent nuclear fuel absent an operational repository or other facility.'' This may represent a lawyer's narrow interpretation of statutory language, but it is not what the act's sponsors said in first presenting it to the Congress on this floor in the fall of 1982:
The primary objective of this legislation is development of licensed facilities to be constructed deep underground for the permanent disposal of high level nuclear waste. * * * We have put into place the most thoughtfully planned out roadmap for what will be a 15-year site investigation and construction program that we could devise.
On the strength of such unambiguous public commitments, scores of electric utilities entered into contracts with the Department. As in all contracts, one party agreed to do certain things if the other party or parties agreed to do certain other things.
In this case, the utilities agreed to collect special fees from electricity consumers and to remit those fees to the Department. The Department's reciprocal responsibility, in the words of the standard contract signed by all, was ``To accept title to all spent nuclear fuel and/or high level wastes, of domestic origin, generated by the civilian power reactors. * * *''
The Department's lawyers may quibble, as lawyers do, about the precise nature of DOE's obligations and responsibilities. They
are even free to argue that no inescapable legal obligation exists, but they cannot argue that no moral obligation or expectation exists about the Department's responsibilities. The bill I am introducing today makes unambiguously clear what we expect to be done and, most important, when we expect it to be done.
My interest in this stems from our experience in western Michigan. The Palisades nuclearpower plant, owned and operated by Consumers Power, ran out of storage space in its pools. Because there is nowhere to send the spent fuel rods, Consumers has had to use so-called dry cask storage in 130-ton concrete and steel containers a stone's throw from Lake Michigan. The four other nuclear powerplants in Michigan and more than 100 in other States will ultimately have to follow suit if the Federal Government doesn't live up to its responsibilities.
Both dry cask and pool storage are safe but there can be no question that centralized storage in one or several remote areas is better than leaving wastes at 70 sites sprinkled across the American continent. I am also concerned that the Federal Government's continued failure to honor this commitment undermines the Government's standing in the eyes of its own citizens.
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