> a federal court in 2013 said they have to stop collecting fees until they come up with a use for them
This is fascinating! I didn't realize that killing Yucca Mountain triggered lower taxes for the companies producing the waste. That's pretty poor incentive alignment. It also might help explain the seemingly excessive amount of ad-spend against Yucca mountain when I lived in Nevada.
There are a lot of people who've campaigned against nuclear over the years, including fossil fuel companies. I think it's a stretch to think nuclear companies campaigned against waste storage in hopes that a future court case would eliminate their fees...especially since the consequence is that they have to store the waste locally at the plant site, which isn't free either. It's reasonable that if they're paying for that, they shouldn't also have to pay for a repository that doesn't exist.
Meanwhile, fossil plants dump their waste into the atmosphere and don't pay a dime for it.
Campaign against it? While in the short term they certainly don't want to pay for a non-service, they are 100% behind the government taking away their waste problem.
There is a bunch of defense-related politics here. The US doesn't generally reprocess nuclear waste into useful things (ie new fuel). The DOE, who control nuclear weapons, like to have a huge pile of waste lying around because some of it can be reprocessed into weapons-grade material. Yucca would have been more a stockpile than disposal site. That's why more practical means of burial (deep cores) were never really discussed. They didn't want to put it somewhere out of reach.
The waste management fee is not a tax. It is payment for a service that the government declared can only be provided by the government, but that it is too inept to actually provide.
I don't know, fellow Nevadan here and I didn't feel like I got a lot of ads on Yucca but I did feel like the way it was framed made it such a non-starter for any politician so it became impossible to back.
No one wants to be the Senator who voted to let nuclear plants dump their toxic waste near Las Vegas, especially given the atomic testing history of Nevada already
This is fascinating! I didn't realize that killing Yucca Mountain triggered lower taxes for the companies producing the waste. That's pretty poor incentive alignment. It also might help explain the seemingly excessive amount of ad-spend against Yucca mountain when I lived in Nevada.