Nuclear Power Legislative Priorities for 2009
Strengthen Programs to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism – UCS supports the goal of shortening the timeline for securing the remaining weapons-usable nuclear material around the globe, and Congress should provide both the funding and support for any new programs to reach that laudable goal, including providing additional funding for the International Atomic Energy Agency. To ensure that terrorists do not gain access to weapon-usable plutonium, Congress should also eliminate the Department of Energy's (DOE's) mixed oxide program at the Savannah River Site, and instead significantly increase funding to immobilize the plutonium from dismantled warheads.
Limit the Expansion of Taxpayer Subsidies for New Nuclear Power Plants - Existing and proposed federal and state subsidies for new nuclear power plants threaten to divert tens of billions of dollars from cleaner low-carbon technologies that could be implemented faster, cheaper, and with lower risks. Providing additional and massive taxpayer subsidies to the nuclear industry in combination with the high costs and risks of that technology could make achieving needed global warming pollution reductions politically unaffordable. The goal is to minimize the diversion of resources from renewable energy technologies to nuclear power technologies while supporting continued research and development to resolve important safety, security, and economic problems that would enable nuclear to be deployed as a future option. Congress must recognize the comparative economic, safety, security and other disadvantages of nuclear power as a near-term climate solution, and the need to resolve those issues before nuclear can become a viable option for reducing heat-trapping emissions in the future. Congress should not enact further federal direct or indirect regulatory subsidies for the nuclear power industry in climate and/or energy legislation that are not available to other low-carbon sources.
Improve Nuclear Power Safety – Poor management and ineffective regulatory oversight unnecessarily decreases safety and increases the cost of nuclear power. Congress should require that an external entity conduct safety culture surveys of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff every two years and make the results publicly available, that spent fuel be transferred from spent fuel pools to dry casks after five years, and that the remaining fuel be dispersed throughout the pool to minimize the vulnerability of nuclear reactor plants to attacks. Finally, UCS recommends that the NRC require all new reactor designs be evaluated for vulnerability to aircraft attacks and that all such vulnerabilities be corrected.
Stop the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) – Congress should not support the plan to reprocess spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants first proposed by the Bush administration. The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership reprocessing scheme would separate out weapons-usable plutonium and other isotopes from the dangerously radioactive components of spent fuel, making it easier for terrorists to acquire nuclear weapons materials. In the near and medium term, the safest and most cost-effective means of dealing with nuclear waste is to store it at reactor sites in hardened dry casks. The long-term solution to waste management is development of an appropriate geological repository, and given Yucca Mountain's current woes, Congress should require the DOE to begin the search for alternative sites. Any repository selection process should satisfy rigorous safety criteria and local public concerns. And instead of annually pouring hundreds of millions into reprocessing, Congress should support research into improving the safety and security of reactors either in operation or likely to be built in the next few decades.
