THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 20, 1995 TAG: 9507200002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
The same Congress and executive branch that often cannot see past the next election are seeking a safe site to store nuclear wastes for millennia.
The search, of late, has gone backward, leaving Hampton Roads stuck with highly radioactive wastes.
Spent fuel rods and other contaminated materials from the Navy's nuclear fleet are stored in six containers at Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth and six rail cars at Newport News Shipbuilding.
As staff writer Scott Harper reported Sunday, the wastes were supposed to be shipped to Idaho for temporary storage, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction this month blocking shipments till another nuclear-related legal challenge is settled. Important Navy work may well be blocked by the lack of nuclear-storage sites, and Newport News Shipbuilding says that if the delay of shipment to Idaho remains in effect in 1996, hundreds of jobs could be lost.
Last week, the House of Representatives voted to delay work on the permanent dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Over 13 years, $4.5 billion has been spent preparing that site, with the decision whether it can be used still nine years away.
Heaping insanity atop insanity, the U.S. government is proposing to import 22,000 spent rods from foreign reactors over the next 13 years, though no one knows where to put them. Hampton Roads would be one of 10 ports through which the nuclear wastes travel.
At Surry, a rifle-shot from historic Jamestown, Virginia Power is storing 26 massive cylinders of spent fuel rods on a concrete slab surrounded by a chain-link fence and watched by an armed guard. The cylinders - each 16 feet high and 8 feet wide - are designed to last 40 years. Altogether they contain 264.5 metric tons of fiery-hot, intensely radioactive waste that will be potent for tens of thousands of years. Minimal math skills are required to compute that tens of thousands of years is longer than 40 years. Another 374 tons of radioactive materials are stored in a pool of water between the plant's two units.
It would appear that the nuclear-waste program is being run by the major-league-baseball owners.
The past 13 years, the U.S. Department of Energy has collected $9 billion in fees and interest from utilities, including $343 million from Virginia Power customers, with $400 million more in additional assessments planned. The State Corporation Commission has begun investigating why utility customers have to pay for a radioactive fund accomplishing next to nothing.
The U.S. House of Representatives has ordered the Energy Department to find a temporary storage site for spent fuel until a long-range solution is found. By temporary, the House means up to 100 years.
Tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste cannot be wished away, but storing some of it in metropolitan areas like Hampton Roads is crazy. Idaho might not be the best nuclear-waste-storage site, but right now it's the least-bad solution. And any congressman who votes again to delay construction on the permanent-storage site at Yucca Mountain should automatically have 5,000 tons of nuclear wastes stored in his district. by CNB