3rd investor abandons PFS project for nuclear waste

WASHINGTON — Florida Power and Light Co. will no longer help Private Fuel Storage move forward, it announced Tuesday, marking the third financial hit for the proposed nuclear waste storage site in less than a week.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said the financial shake-up last week was the "first nail in the coffin for PFS" and called Tuesday's announcement "another strong nail." He said 57 percent of the PFS consortium's investments are now on hold, and he believes the remaining companies will not be able to move to the construction phase.

"It would be a tremendous costly burden for them to do this on their own," Hatch said.

But PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin said not to read too much into the companies' decisions. The site was always going to be done in phases, and there are a lot of other companies out there who have storage needs that could sign on in the future to move the project to its next stage, she said.

"The future of the project is not in the hands of these eight," she said "We always knew they were either going to sign on as customers or not."

She said like any big project, the market will ultimately decide when the right time would be for PFS to be built.

Hatch approached three of Private Fuel Storage's eight investing companies in an effort to persuade them that storing 40,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel rods at the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation in Tooele County would be a bad idea. So far, all three have changed their status, according to Hatch's staff. He is pursuing others, but his office would not say which.

Florida Power and Light, like Xcel Energy and Southern Co., used the Energy Department's Yucca Mountain project as their main catalyst for the change. The Energy Department intends to store 77,000 tons of used nuclear fuel at Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Congress approved the site in 2002, although it still faces numerous challenges, so it may be several years before it opens — if it opens at all.

The government agreed to take used nuclear fuel from companies by 1998 but failed to do so. Utilities needing another option for a place to store their increasing inventory of nuclear waste spurred the formation of Private Fuel Storage more than a decade ago.

"To provide further support to PFS at this point would require us to conclude either that the federal government will not fulfill its absolute obligation under law to receive and store used nuclear fuel or that it is appropriate for (Florida Power and Light) to assume responsibility for storing used fuel at away-from-reactor sites," wrote Lew Hay, chairman of the utility's holding company, FPL Group, in a letter expected at Hatch's office today.