Only one low-level landfill, in Utah, has opened in the past 30 years. One more could open in Texas by the end of next year, but it would accept trash from only Vermont and the Lone Star State.
“At the regional level, some towns accept having nuclear plants and others oil refineries,” Mr. Fauchon said. “I don’t ask Bretons if they’re happy about having pigsties and raising pigs, which creates another source of pollution.”
At a nuclear plant in Tricastin, in Provence, 163 pounds of untreated uranium in liquid leaked from a faulty tank during a draining operation, seeping into the ground and then into rivers that flow into the Rhône.
While the two-year-old Authority for Nuclear Security, an independent body overseeing civilian nuclear activities, called it a category one (out of seven) incident that posed no health risk, the local prefect banned fishing, irrigation, swimming and the use of well water. The ban lasted 14 days, and the government criticized Areva, the nuclear group that is mostly state-owned, for not informing local authorities quickly or adequately. The treatment station, which was old, was being replaced, and remains shut.
Other minor accidents occurred in quick succession: a burst underground pipe at another site north of Tricastin, which leaked a tiny amount of uranium inside plant grounds, and then another accident at Tricastin itself, when 100 employees were contaminated by radioactive particles that escaped from a pipe.
The government, Areva and EDF have played down the accidents.
Our system of security is extremely responsive and transparent, and that the media and public opinion needed a training period to understand how the system of nuclear security works in France.
Forgotten but not gone, the waste from more than 100 nuclear reactors that the federal government was supposed to start accepting for burial 10 years ago is still at the reactor sites, at least 20 years behind schedule. But it is making itself felt in the federal budget.
With court orders and settlements, the federal government has already paid the utilities $342 million, but is virtually certain to pay a total of at least $7 billion in the next few years and probably over $11 billion, government officials said. The industry said the total could reach $35 billion.
The payments come from an obscure and poorly understood government account that requires no new Congressional appropriations, and will balloon in size, experts said.
At some point, the escalating costs slow down, because some of the expenses for dry storage are incurred only once, like the engineering work, or installation of a crane to get the cask in and out of the spent fuel pool, officials said. But costs rise again at the point where the reactor that generated the fuel becomes too old to run, and is torn down; at that point, the entire expense of the guard force and the maintenance workers are attributable to the waste.
That has already happened in California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and Michigan.
Each reactor typically creates about 20 tons of waste a year, which is approximately two new casks, at roughly $1 million each. If a repository or interim site opened, clearing the backlog would take decades, experts say. At present, waste is in temporary storage at 122 sites in 39 states.
The Energy Department has launched an initiative to gather the waste and run it through a factory to recover re-usable components, which would allow centralized storage, but that program’s prospects are highly uncertain.
The government has spent $11 billion on Yucca Mountain, Mr. Sproat said. The project has dragged on so long that some of the research data is stored on obsolete computers that must be replaced, program officials said.
