$26.9B to open and run Yucca Mountain till 2023

WASHINGTON — It will cost $26.9 billion to build and operate the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump through 2023, the Energy Department said Friday in a new cost calculation.

The department did not release a new figure for the total life-cycle cost of the Nevada project, estimated in 2001 at $58 billion. The department plans to recalculate that figure in May and it almost certainly will rise, said Edward F. "Ward" Sproat, director of the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.

The $26.9 billion figure, about in line with recent estimates, assumes that the department meets its goal of opening the repository in March 2017, Sproat told reporters on a conference call.

"It is our best estimate at this stage of the game as to what the total program's going to cost. We think it's an accurate projection," he said.

That 2017 opening date is a best-case scenario and Sproat cautioned that it will slip if the department does not get the money it needs each year for the dump. In recent years the department's budget goals have not been met, partly because of opposition from Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who now has even more power as Senate majority leader.

President Bush requested $544.5 million for the dump in the 2007 fiscal year but Congress ended up agreeing to $444.5 million, forcing the Energy Department to curtail some activities. Bush is asking Congress to spend $494.5 million on the dump in 2008, a figure Reid has said he wants to trim.

DOE is aiming to submit a required license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in June 2008, and Friday's cost estimate shows annual budget needs soaring past $1 billion beginning in the 2009 fiscal year.

The cost figures assume that the NRC will issue a construction authorization in September 2011 — within the three-year time period specified by the federal Nuclear Waste Policy Act.

The $26.9 billion is broken into two pieces: $18.5 billion to complete operational facilities and transportation infrastructure through 2021; and $8.4 billion in operational costs from 2016-2023.

The new cost estimate met criticism from Nevada lawmakers, who are unanimously opposed to Yucca Mountain and would prefer to store nuclear waste at the reactor sites where some 50,000 tons of it already has piled up with nowhere to go.