Yucca fight could bring work to PFS

WASHINGTON — Nevada on Wednesday continued the fight in the U.S. Senate against its own potential nuclear waste storage site, a battle Utah's delegation has become involved in.

The progress and status of the government's Yucca Mountain project in Nevada is important for Utah because utilities need a place to store their waste. If Yucca continues to face more delays, utilities may opt to put their waste at Private Fuel Storage, a private nuclear waste storage site planned for Tooele County's Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation, until Yucca opens. The consortium of utilities received its license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last month, with a notice in Tuesday's Federal Register finalizing the process.

Nuclear waste continues to be hot topic in Congress as the Energy Department continues its push to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, and the nuclear power industry wants nothing more than for the government to take its waste from power plants as was promised two decades ago.

Paul Golan, the acting Yucca chief, said before the Senate Environment and Public Works committee Wednesday that the department is working on a new design for the repository and hopes to have a new schedule for the license application by the end of the summer.

But Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and John Ensign, R-Nev., reiterated the need for Congress to rethink storing nuclear waste at Yucca and look at other options — including storing waste at the power plants themselves.

"It should be clear to everyone that the proposed Yucca Mountain project is not going anywhere," Reid said. "We've spent $10 billion and we have nothing. We have nothing to show for this."

All five members of Utah's congressional delegation joined with Nevada's late last year in sponsoring a bill that would allow utilities to use money now earmarked to move waste to Yucca to transfer waste to dry storage. The Energy Department would take responsibility for the waste once stored in the dry cask, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would have to create rules on how to transfer the waste. The bill is still pending. Only Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, still supports the Yucca Mountain project, while the rest of the delegation has come out against it.

The administration is preparing its own bill that would alter several components of the Yucca project to help move it along, although which lawmakers will introduce it or when is still not clear.