The Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management

I quote:

The Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) is a program of the U.S. Department of Energy assigned to develop and manage a federal system for disposing of spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear reactors and high-level radioactive waste from national defense activities.

I quote, again:

Our mission is to manage and dispose of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel in a manner that protects health, safety and the environment; enhances national and energy security; and merits public confidence.

So one of the purposes of this government agency is to help externalize the costs of operating a commercial nuclear power facility. In layman's terms, to make you and me pay for the disposal of nuclear garbage that came from nuclear power plants all over the country.

"But, Drizz, what about this?"

In 1982, Congress enacted a law called the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA). The NWPA created the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) within the Department of Energy to develop a comprehensive national program for the permanent disposal of high-level radioactive wastes and spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear utilities and national defense programs. [...] The NWPA directs the U.S. Department of Energy to site, design, construct, operate, and close a deep geologic repository and affirms the responsibility of the generators of the wastes - the nuclear utilities and the federal defense nuclear program - to pay the costs of disposal.

My emphasis.

What about that? Well, I don't know to what extent private companies pay for the disposal of the waste they generate. However, dig this:

The OCRWM Program includes:

• Program Management - Program management activities are administered from Washington, DC. Responsibilities include oversight of quality assurance, program planning and administration, program management and integration, external interactions, human resources, and the OCRWM budget.
  
• Yucca Mountain Project – The Yucca Mountain site is located in Nye County, Nevada, approximately 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. For two decades, the OCRWM conducted scientific and engineering investigations at Yucca Mountain to determine its suitability as a nuclear waste repository.
  
• Science and Technology Program – The program explores technological improvements that could enhance the performance, safety, and efficiency of the repository at Yucca Mountain, and/or reduce the costs of the civilian radioactive waste management system.
  
• Waste Acceptance and Transportation – Headquartered in Washington, DC., responsibilities include development of waste acceptance, storage and transportation systems. Activities also include interactions with other waste owners, generators and international waste management programs.

That's a hefty list of both administrative and operational duties the OCRWM oversees and performs. These duties are undertaken within the context of the highly technical, complex, mind- and experience-intensive context in the fields of nuclear physics, structural engineering, geology, and others. This cannot be cheap.

It, in fact, is not.

Customers who use nuclear power pay for the disposal of spent fuel. The federal government collects a fee of one mil (one-tenth of a cent) per kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity from utilities. This money goes into the Nuclear Waste Fund. In addition, Congress makes an annual appropriation from the General Fund of the Treasury to pay for disposal of defense-related high-level radioactive waste.

Not everyone in the United States has a power company that buys nuclear-generated electricity, but they do not constitute a small number. Either those individuals pay the tax through higher utility bills, or, if the utility is owned and operated by "the public," it is possible the local governments help them out...and we all know that help comes out of the wallets of local taxpayers.

How much does all this cost? An answer (PDF): the congressional budget request for the 2003 fiscal year was more than $590 million. The agency got more than $457 million. The Department of Energy, for the 2006 fiscal year, asked for more than $651 million (PDF) in taxpayer cash for the OCRWM (agency request here).

It does not matter to me that this would represent roughly two bucks per living American in taxes, if egalitarian means were used to distribute the burden. Ultimately, we are forced to pay for the hefty costs of figuring out how to safely and effectively transport tons of radioactive waste materials created by companies that have part of this cost outsourced to the federal government. Since the companies created them, it is their property and therefore their responsibility, not mine or yours.

Going back to a previous link:

The law is based on the principle that the generation benefitting [sic] from nuclear materials is responsible for safely disposing of the nuclear wastes it creates, rather than leaving a potentially dangerous environmental hazard to future generations.

This is one of those classic political bullshit lines, attempting to masquerade as a principle.

I am not a creator of nuclear waste nor power and neither is anyone in my immediate family nor is anyone within my circle of friends. However, we are all in the "generation" of citizens this supposed principle subsumes. The creators (and by extension, owners) of nuclear waste are people who produce it. This means plant owners and operators have the responsibility of owning potentially lethal nuclear waste. Ideally, this nontrivial cost would be prominently factored into the initial plans for building these plants. However, these costs are mitigated and are lessened because the feds have involved themselves (sometimes at the urging of the nuclear industry).

How am I responsible for something I had nothing to do with, located hundreds of miles away, and done without my knowledge, input, or consent? Even more frustratingly stupid: how does an entire GENERATION get sucked into this broken chain of causality?

Posted by Drizzten at July 18, 2005 01:42 PM