Posted on 12/01/2024 9:05:44 AM PST by Pontiac
The Department of Energy’s estimated overall liability for failing to dispose of the country’s commercial spent nuclear fuel jumped as much as 10 percent this year, from a range of $34.1 billion to $41 billion in 2023 to a range of $37.6 billion to $44.5 billion in 2024, according to a financial audit of the DOE’s Nuclear Waste Fund (NWF) for fiscal year 2024.
The estimated liability excludes $11.1 billion already paid out to nuclear power plant owners and utilities for the DOE’s breach of the standard contract for the disposal of spent fuel (10 CFR Part 961), which required the DOE to begin taking title of spent nuclear fuel for disposal by January 1998. Owners of spent fuel routinely sue the federal government for the continued cost of managing the fuel. The recovered costs are paid out from the Treasury Department’s Judgement Fund and not from the DOE.
According to the audit, conducted by the independent public accounting firm of KPMG, the liability estimate “reflects a range of possible scenarios” regarding the operating life of the current fleet of nuclear power reactors. The estimate is also based on when the DOE thinks it may begin taking spent fuel. In May, the DOE received initial approval (Critical Decision-0) for a consolidated interim storage facility for spent fuel that, if constructed, would be operational by 2046.
The Department of Energy Nuclear Waste Fund’s Fiscal Year 2024 Financial Statement Audit was released by the DOE Office of Inspector General on November 14.
The fund: The NWF, which was intended to finance the DOE’s disposal of spent fuel, had a balance of $52.2 billion as of September, according to the KPMG audit.
The NWF was funded through annual fees—initially, $0.001 for every kilowatt hour provided by a nuclear power plant—levied by the DOE on owners and generators of spent fuel. The DOE stopped collecting annual NWF fees, however, in 2014 following an order by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which found that the DOE failed to justify the continued imposition of the fee following the suspension of the Yucca Mountain repository project.
Conservatives are so gleeful at the idea of more nuclear power. And we can’t even get rid of the waste we have. Those spent fuel pools are a dirty bomb of unimaginable destruction that will last 100,000 years. Add them all up and they do have the capacity to eliminate the human race from existence.
Spent Fuel is a political problem not a technological problem.
Most of the spent fuel today is not in pools but in cask that are safe from all but nuclear weapons. I you hit them with a nuke I don’t think anyone is going to raise a fuss about the spent fuel.
I don’t think you have visited a Nuclear Power Plant in the last ten years because if you had I doubt that you have any worries about someone getting a bomb anywhere close to the spent fuel pools. Security at Nuke plants is superior to that of military bases.
Yes,and reverse the peanut farmers EO banning reprocessing fuel rods.🤔
That would be foolish. Nearly all the original energy is still in those rods and can be utilized for generations to come with technologies such as breeder reactors.
If spent fuel gets vaporized then a nuclear explosion is the least of your problems. You should know that.
I guess you didn’t know that nuclear explosions Neutron Activate non-radioactive material near the explosion making that material radio active.
So, the area would be radioactive for hundreds of years regardless of the spent fuel.
And of course since the nuclear weapon spreads radioactive material from the bomb itself the area is radioactive.
Yes there will be more contamination from the spent fuel but but you have already crossed the Rubicon into nuclear war, What’s the point?
And if your really want to do the nuclear weapon and spread unGodly levels of contamination across the country I would choose a DOE waste site like Savanah River or Hanford’s High-Level Waste Facility. A spent fuel pool is also ran.
And just be realistic. A nuclear weapon is a very unlikely in to the range of lunacy, terror weapon.
Sorry that you have bought into the fear mongering Left.
We have one in Pahrump, Nevada.
Musk will figure it out by lunch time.
It’s pretty damn big. Mine some side drifts off the main tunnel and you could probably have enough real estate.
I wonder if the tunnel boring machine is still there.
Probably not. That is a pretty expensive machine.
Two bombs were dropped in Japan. People live there. A nuclear power plant blew up in Russia. No one will living there for eons. So we already have proof of the difference. But you have bought the hype of those who don’t have any sense. And then justified it by declaring it a mindset of the left.
That’s really cheap!
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