WASHINGTON -- Over the next 16 years, the cost of building and operating a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain will be almost $27 billion, the project's director said Friday.
Ward Sproat, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said it would cost $18.5 billion to open the repository by 2017 and finish transportation routes to the facility.
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Another $8.4 billion would be needed to operate the repository through 2023, Sproat said. "We have an 80 percent confidence level that these numbers are correct," he told reporters in a conference call.
Sproat noted that the figures do not reflect the amount needed to operate the Yucca Mountain repository until it is closed. He said the Department of Energy plans to release those numbers in May.
The estimates released Friday came in response to a request in July from the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The committee, which oversees the Yucca Mountain Project, asked Sproat to provide new cost projections after he said the opening of the repository would have to be delayed from 2010 to 2017.
In 2001, the Energy Department said it would cost $57.6 billion to open the repository by 2010.
Nevada lawmakers said the new cost estimates demonstrate why nuclear waste should remain at the reactors that produce it.
"The DOE's new partial budget estimate is sheer fantasy based on legislation that will never pass and a timetable that is about as realistic as the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and the ghost of Elvis," Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said in a prepared statement.
Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., issued a statement saying the cost projections show why Congress and the Bush administration "need to put and end to this reckless waste of taxpayer funds now."
Last week, the Energy Department reintroduced the "fix Yucca Mountain" bill aimed at expediting the licensing of the repository, which would be located 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Sens. John Ensign, R-Nev., and Harry Reid, D-Nev., on the same day countered with legislation requiring nuclear waste to stay at reactor sites.
