MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) – A recent court decision on plans to bury tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste under Nevada’s Yucca Mountain has lent new urgency to questions about the waste being generated at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.

Those questions are expected to be front-and-center before lawmakers next winter as Vermont Yankee seeks to install a new type of spent fuel storage on its Vernon site. They also may be an issue in this year’s gubernatorial campaign.

In a ruling earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the Department of Energy’s promise that the waste could be stored safely at Yucca Mountain for 10,000 years wasn’t good enough; it implied that the standard would have to be several hundred thousand years.

Meeting the new standard, if it is possible and if Congress can muster the votes to try, could require extensive redesign and retrofitting at the Yucca Mountain facility. The opening date for that project, originally expected to be 1998, more recently had been pegged at 2010.

Energy Department officials say they believe they can push ahead and meet the 2010 deadline. Yucca critics scoff at that idea. “My comment is “good luck.’ I don’t think this is going to fly in anyone’s book,” said Bob Loux, chief of Nevada’s state Agency for Reactor Projects.

Robert Williams, spokesman for Vermont Yankee owner Entergy Nuclear, said his company is betting with the Energy Department. “We do not expect a delay in DOE being able to receive commercially generated spent fuel,” he said.

Like other reactors, Vermont Yankee has a spent fuel pool, which was designed to hold highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies in 40 feet of water – temporarily – until they could be shipped off to a permanent disposal site. That temporary arrangement has been in place now for 32 years – the life of the reactor.

In an interview last week, David O’Brien, the commissioner of Vermont’s Department of Public Service, noted that the spent fuel pool at Vermont Yankee, if it continues filling up at its current rate, will be out of room before the plant’s license expires in 2012.

Estimates vary as to exactly when the pool will be at capacity. But on one point Entergy Nuclear and its critics agree: If the plant is allowed to boost its power output by 20 percent – a request recently given conditional approval by the Public Service Board and now before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission – the plant will consume more fuel and the pool will be filled up sooner.

Entergy already has made known its plans to ask permission to use “dry casks” to store spent fuel on a concrete pad outdoors at the plant site. The opening salvos in that debate were fired this past spring, when Entergy sought – and the Legislature declined to grant – an exemption from the state law that says lawmakers must approve any new nuclear waste storage facility in Vermont.

Allowing dry cask storage at Vermont Yankee would solve three problems for Entergy. One is the nearly depleted room in the pool if the plant continues running as it is now. A second is the more quickly depleted pool space if the plant is allowed to boost its power.

The third problem is what to do with the waste that would be generated if Entergy gets its longer term wish to continue operating Vermont Yankee past the currently scheduled expiration of the plant’s 40-year license in 2012.

O’Brien said, “Whether the plant is uprated or not, there is a finite life of the spent fuel pool,” O’Brien said. “It (the pool’s life) terminates before the licensed life terminates. The fuel will have to be dealt with. Absent a national repository, some sort of dry cask storage will be possibly in play.”

Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle, a Democrat who has said he hopes to highlight energy issues in his campaign for governor this year, said he believes it has been a mistake to consider the plant’s request for the power boost separately from the dry-cask storage question.

“It seems that before we can have any serious discussion about expanding the capacity of that plant – or certainly extending the license – we ought to have a plan for the storage of the nuclear waste,” Clavelle said in an interview.

State Auditor Elizabeth Ready, a former chairwoman of the Senate Natural Resources Committee who participated in debates over the disposal of low-level radioactive waste in the early 1990s, was emphatic that some solution to the waste issue is needed before the plant is allowed to increase its output.

She noted that a 1991 study by an engineering consultant recommended against disposing of low-level radioactive waste at the Vermont Yankee site because of the high water table and likelihood that the material could seep into the adjacent Connecticut River.

Williams sought in an interview in May to distinguish between permanent low-level waste storage – as was proposed in the 1990s – and temporary storage of high-level waste.

But Ready and others argued that, as with the spent fuel pool, the definition of temporary storage could stretch.

Ready said the recent federal court decision “means there will be no federal site. If Entergy is allowed to dispose of its high level waste on the banks of the river, it will be there forever. I can think of no greater risk to the state of Vermont.

“If the court found that waste cannot be safely stored at a dry desert site,” Ready added, “how in the world can we even consider a wetland in Vernon?”

She predicted that when lawmakers return next winter, “dry cask storage will be one of the biggest issues we’ve seen in a long time.”

AP-ES-07-18-04 1757EDT