Kim Cawley, Chief of CBO’s Natural and Physical Resources Cost Estimates Unit, testifies on the Nuclear Waste Policy Act before the Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy, Committee on Energy and Commerce, U.S. House of Representatives. December 3, 2015.

“This testimony provides updated information about the federal government’s responsibilities and liabilities under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA) and the status and budgetary treatment of the Nuclear Waste Fund. The testimony makes the following key points:

• Since 2010, the Administration has taken a variety of actions to terminate a project to build a geologic repository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada—the only site where such waste is authorized to be stored under current law. Although agencies have continued activities related to licensing that facility, the Congress has since provided no new funding to the Department of Energy (DOE) to build it.
• Largely in response to such actions, the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and the Nuclear Energy Institute filed petitions with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to end the federal government’s collection of fees paid by nuclear power generators to cover the cost of disposing of civilian nuclear waste.
• In November 2013, that court effectively ordered DOE to suspend collection of annual fees from nuclear power generators. The court found that in DOE’s most recent assessment of the adequacy of the fees to cover the lifetime costs of disposal, the department had failed to provide a legally justifiable basis for continuing to collect fees in the absence of an identifiable strategy for waste management. In May 2014, pursuant to the court’s order, DOE stopped collecting disposal fees, which had previously totaled roughly $750 million per year…”