Utility ratepayers and taxpayers pay as nuclear debate continues

(This is an excerpt of an article from the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.)
 
By: Maggie Mulvihill, Shay Totten, and Matt Porter

The Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Plymouth, MA.

BOSTON -- Over three decades, New England’s electricity consumers and nuclear plant owners have poured close to $1 billion into a federal nuclear-waste storage fund, holding up their end of a 1982 deal with the federal government to finance the permanent storage of thousands of tons of spent fuel from the region’s reactors.

The payoff?

An empty $11 billion hole in a Nevada mountainside, a broken promise from the U.S. government to remove the radioactive waste, and mounting bills that could still saddle New England with mothballed plants and hundreds of spent-fuel casks, turning communities into mini-nuclear waste dumps for decades, if not forever.

“It’s the most expensive dry hole we’ve ever built,” said Dave Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Nuclear Safety Project. “Who would trust the government with a dollar after they’ve wasted billions? We’ve messed this up as bad as we possibly could.”

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