Nuclear Waste Piles Up—in Budget Deficit
From the Wall Street Journal:
Imagine a football field packed 20 feet high with highly radioactive nuclear waste. That's about the volume of the 65,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel stranded at dozens of nuclear sites across the U.S.
It isn't just a potential public health hazard, as Japan's recent nuclear disaster showed, but a growing burden on the federal government's groaning finances.
A decades-old promise to dispose of the waste has become another unfunded liability, starting with a $25 billion ratepayer fund gone astray and $16 billion or more in estimated legal judgments to compensate utilities for their storage expenses. The costs of the ultimate disposal project also are sure to rise, with no plan in sight to replace the now-canceled plan to entomb the waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.
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