U.S. Settles Nuclear Case Over Burial of Waste

WASHINGTON - - The federal government promised recently to pay at least $300 million in damages to the Exelon Corporation, for its failure to accept nuclear waste for burial, in a settlement that implies a total cost to the Energy Department in the billions of dollars.

Exelon operates about one-sixth of the nation's nuclear reactors. Its predecessor companies, like the owners of all the power reactors in the United States, signed contracts with the Energy Department in the early 1980's agreeing to pay Washington one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour of power produced at the reactors; in return, the government promised to take their nuclear waste, beginning in 1998.

Exelon and 64 other companies have sued the Energy Department for failing to do so.

The government would pay the $300 million if the Yucca Mountain, Nev., nuclear repository begins accepting waste in 2010, as is now scheduled, but many experts think that if it opens at all, it will be much later. Under the settlement, if Yucca Mountain opens in 2015, the total will rise to $600 million.

The Energy Department wants Congress to reverse a decision made last month by an appeals court in Washington that threw out some of the rules under which Yucca was to have been licensed, saying they were too lax. The nuclear industry, which wants Yucca opened in part to help pave the way for a new generation of reactors, quickly asserted that the settlement should prompt the government to open Yucca as soon as possible.

Under the recent agreement, Exelon will get $80 million immediately, for storage costs already incurred, and the rest of the money by 2010. The company now operates 17 reactors and has four more that are shut down.

But Brian J. O'Connell, director of the Nuclear Waste Program Office at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, said that if the Exelon settlement formed a pattern for other companies, total damages would clearly run into billions of dollars. Spokesmen for the Justice Department and the Energy Department said they had no estimate.

The initial payment will come from a Treasury Department fund for judgments, but the Treasury will recover the money from the Energy Department, Mr. O'Connell said. He predicted that Congress would appropriate the money or redirect it from other Energy Department programs.

The costs for the delay differ from reactor to reactor. Some plants, like Maine Yankee, Connecticut Yankee or Yankee Rowe in Western Massachusetts, have either been torn down or are being dismantled, and their fuel has been moved into dry casks. In those cases, the presence of the waste is the only reason for a guard force, and sometimes the only reason why the land where the reactors stood cannot be re-used.

In the case of Exelon's two reactors in Zion, Ill., which have been shut down, the fuel is still in the spent fuel pools inside the plant. That requires the continued operation of many mechanical systems that might otherwise have been shut down.

At other reactors, costs are mostly limited to the construction of dry casks, which are small steel and concrete silos with no moving parts, sitting on a concrete pad surrounded by barbed wire. As the years go by, at more and more sites the waste will have outlasted the reactors that produced it.

At the Nuclear Energy Institute, the trade association of reactor owners, Angelina Howard, a vice president, said in a statement that the settlement was "hugely significant."

"The agreement means that taxpayers in every state, including those who do not receive electricity supplies from nuclear power plants, are now officially paying the cost of the federal government's failure to meet its obligations," she said. "The government's willingness to enter into this settlement is the fair thing to do since it hasn't met its obligations to Exelon and the company's customers."

The nuclear utilities' payments to the Nuclear Waste Fund since 1983, plus interest, total $24 billion, she said.