Nuclear Interests Belie Offshore Drilling Proposal

Presented by KUTV.Com.

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - A Republican proposal to begin drilling for oil off the U.S. coast includes provisions that would significantly alter the country's nuclear energy policy, potentially providing billions of dollars of profit for a Utah nuclear waste disposal firm that the company's former lobbyist-turned-congressman has inserted into the bill.

Republicans, including President Bush, want to lift a federal ban on offshore drilling as a way to increase oil supply and lower gas prices. Recent polls suggest most Americans are in favor of lifting the ban, although Democratic leaders oppose it because of environmental concerns. Republicans had hoped to rush through a bill this week lifting the ban, but Democrats refused to allow a vote on it before their August break.

"Instead of allowing a vote on the American Energy Act, which would promote energy production, conservation and innovation to bring down fuel costs, they instead chose to simply skip town – and leave Americans on their own to pay the price," House Minority Leader John Boehner said in a statement Wednesday.

Congress reconvenes Sept. 8 and the issue is expected to remain at the forefront of the national debate on energy throughout the presidential election.

The bill Boehner is pushing includes numerous energy proposals unrelated to offshore drilling. Among other things, it calls for removing congressional oversight of a fund meant to build the country's first high-level nuclear waste dump, provides federal subsidies to reprocess spent nuclear fuel and eliminates any need for new nuclear power plants to reasonably prove there will be a future disposal site for their waste.

The proposal would allow the Department of Energy to use money being saved for a permanent high-level nuclear waste disposal site in Nevada to pay for reprocessing spent fuel, possibly setting back the already delayed the project even further.

The Yucca Mountain facility was originally supposed to open in 1998 but has been dogged by rising costs, lawsuits and political controversies. A congressional committee was recently told the best-possible opening date is now 2020 and that the price tag is expected to be $90 billion, up from an original $58 billion estimate.

Republican leadership's proposal is effectively the same bill introduced weeks earlier by U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, a former lobbyist for EnergySolutions Inc., a Salt Lake City-based nuclear waste disposal firm that has recently increased its donations to Bishop's campaign, other congressmen and its spending on federal lobbyists.

"If EnergySolutions and their nuclear zealot friends in Congress are successful in pushing this agenda, they stand to make hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, in federal contracts doing that work," said Vanessa Pierce, executive director of HEAL Utah, a nuclear waste watchdog group.

"This is EnergySolutions' golden goose."

EnergySolutions did not immediately respond to a request for comment and several questions from The Associated Press.

Nobody in the U.S. currently processes nuclear waste, although it is done in Great Britain, France, Japan and Germany.

EnergySolutions owns the right to technology in Great Britain that's used for reprocessing there and in 2006 won part of a $16 million federal grant to study building a reprocessing facility in Atomic City, Idaho, Barnwell, S.C. and Roswell N.M.

"If we can establish the recycling of spent nuclear fuel it will help facilitate increased use of safe, clean nuclear power, which is so important for the environment and for our nation's efforts to lessen our dependency on foreign sources of energy," CEO Steve Creamer said at the time.

Reprocessing was originally developed in the United States to build the atomic bomb, but fears of nuclear proliferation led to it being abandoned in the late 1970s. It became legal again during the Reagan administration, but it's so expensive that no companies are doing it.

The U.S. National Research Council estimated in 1996 that beginning to reprocess the country's spent nuclear fuel rods would cost at least $100 billion. After reprocessing, about 99 percent of the high-level waste would still need to be disposed.

"This whole proposal is really just a boondoggle to make it look like we've done something to deal with the waste issue," Pierce said.

Reprocessing would also create additional low-level radioactive waste. In all likelihood, most of it would be disposed at EnergySolutions' dump in the western Utah desert, which already takes 98 percent of the country's low-level waste.

"It's not hard to figure how EnergySolutions has an economic benefit from this," said Don Hancock, director of the nuclear waste program at Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, N.M., which tracks energy issues in the Southwest.

"I've said to senior people at EnergySolutions, 'If you guys really believe in reprocessing, go out and spend stock.' ... They can go ahead and do it right now. They can't do it if they need federal money to do it. They know their shareholders and the stock market won't give them money to do that. To me, that's kind of the answer as to why reprocessing doesn't work."

Bishop introduced his bill earlier this month, saying it would help fight against a "war on the poor" by high energy prices.

"For those of us that are still worried about a budget, I stand and speak for them," Bishop said during a Washington news conference. "Now is the time to quit talking about scapegoats and now find real solutions to the problems that affect real people."

The phrase "war on the poor" comes from a group called Alliance to Stop the War on the Poor, which is led by the Congress of Racial Equality, church leaders and Western lawmakers. The alliance contends that high energy prices disproportionately affect poor people. It advocates drilling for oil wherever possible and says environmentalists enjoy high gas prices.

"They believe the way to get Americans off gas and move the ball toward alternative energy is to make sure prices stay high," said Niger Innis, alliance co-chairman and CORE spokesman. "They are an obstacle to every effort being made to increase supply."

CORE received more than $230,000 in donations from ExxonMobil between 2004 and 2006, according to the oil company's most recent world giving reports.

Among Western lawmakers the alliance lists as its leaders, one is Utah state Rep. Aaron Tilton, a Republican. Tilton is CEO of Transition Power Development LLC, a company that wants to build at least two 1,500 megawatt nuclear power plants in the state. EnergySolutions has donated more than $20,000 to Tilton's conservative caucus in the past three years.

On the Net: American Energy Act, H.R. 6566, can be found at http://thomas.loc.gov

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