States Sue Doe Over N-Waste

Faced with a mountain of nuclear waste and a shortage of places to put it, a coalition of governments and utilities from 36 states asked a judge Friday to hold the Clinton administration to a 1998 deadline for opening a dump site for spent commercial nuclear fuel.

The coalition, which includes 46 state agencies and 33 power companies, filed papers in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals demanding that the Department of Energy honor a 1982 commitment to take control of stockpiles of highly radioactive wastes that are piling up at power plants around the country.

The petition, filed here Friday, also seeks to free utility companies from paying additional money into a fund for the construction of a still-unbuilt storage site. More than $12 billion has gone into the fund in the past 15 years.

“When Americans hold up their end of a legal bargain, they expect their government to do the same,” said Kris Sanda, commissioner of Minnesota’s Public Service Department.

The action was taken six weeks after Energy Department officials acknowledged in a letter to electric utilities that it cannot meet a Jan. 31, 1998, deadline for accepting spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear plants. The disclosure was hardly surprising, given that the department is 10 years away, at the earliest, from opening a permanent repository for commercial nuclear waste.

At issue is the permanent disposition of more than 30,000 tons of spent fuel rods from 109 nuclear power plants around the United States. Fuel rods typically last from two to six years and are highly radioactive.

With no national or regional dump site available to them, electric utilities have been largely keeping the waste in temporary storage on the grounds of nuclear plants, some in special cooling pools and other materials sealed inside steel casks and housed in garage-size concrete bunkers. Several older plants are running out of storage space.