Environmental and Financial Risks of Current Programs

The U.S. Government's problems with the high-level waste repository at Yucca Mountain and the WIPP transuranic waste repository near Carlsbad are just the latest in a series of troubles in its attempts to site and build a long-lived waste repository. Taking a broader view of the U.S. program, there is a pattern of consistent slippage and failure.

Table 7, for example, shows how U.S. time tables for the opening of a high-level waste repository have repeatedly slipped. In fact, as the table indicates, the date of projected repository availability seems to be receding further into the future the more time passes. Between 1975 and 1989, while 14 years passed, the repository went from 10 years to 21 years into the future.

Shortly after the most recent repository delay, DOE Secretary James Watkins said, in explaining the delay, that "the whole set of schedules was not scientifically sound, not fiscally sound, not technically sound... They were incomplete, misleading, and not properly done."⁸⁵

Similar problems confront disposal of transuranic wastes at the WIPP site in New Mexico. Though this has been built in the face of numerous objections, its opening date has repeatedly been delayed in the face of failures of the site to comply with environmental laws and regulations, and even the DOE's own procedures. Once again, however, the DOE appears to be giving priority to weapons production activities and trying to override legal and environmental concerns. In the face of the difficulties posed by EPA's hazardous waste regulations, ⁸⁶for example, the DOE has sought and received a partial variance from these regulations, as we discussed in the section on WIPP.

As timetables have slipped, costs for the waste disposal programs have increased greatly. Table 8, for example, shows the DOE's estimates for the high-level waste life-cycle system costs, and how they have grown over the years.

From an average of $24 billion in 1983, expected 1988 constant-dollar costs for a two-repository system have grown by over 40 percent to almost $34 billion in 1990. Cost escalation would be much worse than this had not significant program changes occurred since the DOE made its first comprehensive cost estimate. The most significant of these changes include a reduction in the amount of waste expected to be generated during the life of the program (from 134,000 metric tons to about 86,800 metric tons of commercial spent fuel), and the 1987 Congressional designation of Yucca Mountain, Nevada as the sole site to be characterized for the first repository. This meant that the cost of characterization (which originally included plans to characterize three candidate sites for the first repository) were much reduced from what they would have been had the original assumptions remained. This, however, has had a steep price: increased risk of failure and increased environmental risk. Thus, the program is now on a course of both higher costs and higher financial and environmental risks.

When basic assumptions about waste disposal are kept reasonably constant, the actual cost escalation is probably at least double what it appears to be in Table 8. Table 9 compares the unit costs under the 1983 assumptions to the projected unit costs of the DOE's latest estimate. It can be seen that real costs for the basic two-repository system grew by over 80 percent in eight years on a "per unit of fuel disposed" basis, from $179,100 per metric ton in 1983, to $325,200 per metric ton today.

Cost escalations have also plagued the WIPP facility, and are continuing at an alarming rate. In just the past two years, for example, the DOE's projection for WIPP expenditures for the five-year period 1991 to 1995 increased by a factor of 67 percent, from $531 million in 1989, to $884 million in 1991. ⁸⁷ This increase has occurred in spite of the fact that WIPP has not opened as the 1989 cost estimates anticipated.

A more accurate gauge of the true cost escalation may be a comparison of the five-year projection made in 1989 (for fiscal years 1991 to 1995) with the five-year projection made in 1991 (for fiscal years 1993 to 1997), since both estimates anticipate the imminent opening of WIPP. If this comparison is made, five-year cost projections have risen from $531 million in 1989 to around $1.1 billion in 1991, a 107 percent increase. ⁸⁸ Thus, in just two years, the DOE's cost estimates for the first several years of WIPP operation have more than doubled.

Such cost escalations are typical of the DOE's past performance with new programs. It is quite possible that real costs could go on rising significantly, if this past performance is any guide.

• A. Spent Fuel, High-Level, and Transuranic Wastes
  • Background on Nuclear Waste Disposal Issues
  • Current Standards and Regulations for Long-Term Management
  • Interim Management for Spent Fuel: MRS and Onsite Storage
  • Environmental and Financial Risks of Current Programs
    • Transuranic Wastes at WIPP
    • Yucca Mountain
    • Risks of Continued Reliance on the DOE
• B. Low-Level Waste
  • History of Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal
  • Current Standards and Regulations
  • Current Status and Problems with Disposal Plans
• C. Mill Tailings

• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 3: Overview and Critique of the Current Approach to Radioactive Waste Management
• Chapter 5: Summary and Recommendations
• Table of Contents to the Full Report
• Bibliography and References
• Ordering Information

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Institute for Energy and Environmental Research

Comments to Outreach Coordinator, ieer@ieer.org
Takoma Park, Maryland, USA

Last Updated October, 1996

85. As quoted in Wald 1989, p. 8.
86. Promulgated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA).
87. DOE 1989a; DOE 1991b.
88. DOE 1989a; DOE 1991b. The later estimate is given in a range of $1,048 million to $1,143 million.