Court orders halt to nuclear waste fees

A US Court of Appeal has ruled that the Department of Energy (DOE) must stop collecting nuclear waste fees from utilities until it decides how used fuel is to be disposed of.

American utilities and regulators - through the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) and the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) - filed a lawsuit in March 2011 against the DOE for continuing to charge for the halted Yucca Mountain project.

Funding for Yucca Mountain has come from a levy of 0.1 cents per kWh of nuclear power, which currently adds up to about $750 million per year. Nuclear utilities - and therefore their customers - have now paid a total of over $31 billion into the Nuclear Waste Fund.
[link to www.world-nuclear-news.org]
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