Arizona Asks Feds to Stop Charging for Suspended Yucca Nuke Waste Site

The head of Arizona's public utility commission wrote Energy Secretary Stephen Chu Tuesday to explain his department policy of forcing nuclear energy producing states to pay for a waste site that the Obama administration says is off-limits.

Arizona Corporation Commissioner Bob Stump wrote in a letter that customers of the two largest energy companies in Arizona have already forked over $258 million in fees since the Nuclear Waste fund was formed in the 1980s to pay for a repository to store spent fuel.

The administration decided earlier this year that Yucca Mountain in Nevada is a no-go as a site, and pulled its plans to construct the facility.

"Yucca Mountain was identified as a repository in 1987. For the past two decades, over $10 billion dollars have been spent research and developing Yucca Mountain as a repository for the nation's nuclear waste," Stump wrote. "Considering that the purpose of the fund was to build a repository, customers should not have to continue to contribute approximately $770 million in annual payments to the fund."

But the Energy Department said Obama is "taking action to restart the nuclear industry as part of a broad approach to cut carbon pollution and create new energy jobs."

"The administration is fully committed to ensuring that the federal government fulfills its long-term disposal obligations for nuclear waste," Energy spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller said in a written statement. "The fees collected from the nuclear industry are legally mandated and reviewed every year, and will pay the cost of the eventual, long-term disposition of the materials with alternatives to Yucca Mountain."

In 2002, Congress approved Yucca as the nation's only deep earth, geologically safe disposal facility but President Obama's Department of Energy, after lobbying by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, announced in March 2010 it was withdrawing its application to build the national nuclear waste dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Obama created a Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, led by Congressman Lee Hamilton and General Brent Scowcroft, to look for alternative locations for disposal and recycling of nuclear fuel. It held two days of meetings in November to discuss how other countries deal with their spent fuel and alternative strategies to disposing of existing radioactive waste.

Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board ruled in June that the Energy Department cannot "single-handedly derail" Congress' stated intent to build the site. However, its independent regulatory review remains unfinished.

Stump wrote that he was encouraged by the NRC's action, but electricity consumers in Arizona shouldn't be paying into a fund until a decision is made on a dump site.

"If the federal government will not fufill its obligations to the nation by building a repository for the states' nuclear waste, it should, at the very least, stop assessing a fee on electricity consumers in these tough economic times," Stump wrote.