effectively made it impossible for the Nuclear Waste Fund to be used as intended for covering the costs of the nation’s Civilian Radioactive Waste Management System. Therefore, electric utilities have had to recoup the costs of storing SNF another way — through litigation. In dozens of cases, DOE has been found in “partial breach” of its contracts with nuclear utilities. Damages and judgements from these cases are paid through the Department of Justice’s Judgment Fund, which is funded with taxpayer money (BRC 2012, p. 79). In 2019, “the [federal] government now says it expects to pay $35.5 billion to private companies as more and more nuclear plants shut down” (Wade 2019). With the three-headed monster of political standstill, increasing nuclear waste, and high costs looming large, the private sector has begun to search for their own solutions to the nation’s intractable SNF conundrum. In the last few years of the 2010s, a two-pronged approach began to emerge for private companies to move SNF away from the nuclear power plants where it currently resides, while also making a profit. First, private companies began buying decommissioned and decommissioning nuclear power plants. Companies like Holtec International, EnergySolutions, and NorthStar Group Services specialize in handling and transporting radioactive waste and demolishing nuclear power plants. The electric utilities they are buying the plants from are much more adept at building and running plants than they are at decommissioning them. Holtec and NorthStar say their expertise could decrease decommissioning timelines from several decades to eight years (Holtec 2018).
When these companies buy decommissioned and decommissioning nuclear power plants, they also inherit the sites’ funding mechanisms. The NRC requires that “before beginning operations, nuclear power plant licensees must prove they have a financial mechanism, like a parent company guarantee or trust fund, to pay for the eventual decommissioning” (MRMTC 2019a). The NRC requires licensees to report on these funds at least every two years. As of the end of 2016, funds for reactors in decommissioning ranged from $8,360,000 at Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station to $876,400,000 at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, Unit 3. Funds for operating reactors ranged from $90,362,048 at Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, Unit 2 to $1,571,000,000 at Diablo Canyon Power Plant, Unit 2 (NRC 2018). If Holtec or NorthStar complete decommissioning activities and have money from the decommissioning funds left over, it is theirs to keep. In 2019, Holtec had bought Oyster Creek in New Jersey, Pilgrim in Massachusetts, Palisades and Big Rock Point in Michigan, and Indian Point in NewYork. NorthStar currently owns the Vermont Yankee plant (Salsberg 2019). Second, private companies are planning to build and run their own CISFs. These CISFs “could eventually hold up to 100,000 metric tons of [SNF], storing it until a permanent repository is found” (Rott 2019). The owners of these private CISFs are hoping that DOE will be able to contract with them to ship and store SNF at the facilities while a permanent repository is developed. This would fulfill the terms of DOE’s contracts with nuclear energy utilities to take ownership of SNF and remove it from the reactor sites. This could be a win-win situation for the CISF owners who could receive
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