(The Associated Press circulated the following article on December 7.)
LAS VEGAS — The estimated cost of building a railroad line to ship nuclear waste across Nevada to the proposed Yucca Mountain repository has more than doubled, to about $2 billion, an Energy Department official said Wednesday.
The revised figure includes construction of rail yards, maintenance and support facilities that weren’t part of a 2002 estimate for the 319-mile line, said Allen Benson, spokesman for the Energy Department and the Yucca Mountain program in Las Vegas.
Critics of the repository, who had derided the original estimate as far too low, said the new estimate showed the Yucca plan was becoming too expensive.
“It would be cheaper to build a road paved with gold,” said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. “Yucca Mountain is already slated to be the most expensive public works project ever undertaken by the government, and just like this ridiculous railroad boondoggle, its price tag continues to spiral out of control.”
Robert Halstead, a Wisconsin-based consultant for the state of Nevada, which opposes the repository plan, said the new estimate may still be too low for what he said was a challenging route across high desert and several mountain ranges.
“I’ve been saying at least a billion and a half dollars and up to 2 billion based on engineering analyses we did back in 1996, when we knew less about the problems of that route than we do now,” Halstead said.
The Energy Department announced in April 2004 that it planned to ship most of the waste to Yucca Mountain by train. The department said it would build the new rail line from Caliente, a small town 150 miles northeast of Las Vegas, to the Yucca Mountain site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
No railroad currently runs to Yucca Mountain, and project planners also have considered shipping waste canisters by rail to Caliente, than transferring them to trucks for transport to the repository.
The 2002 railroad cost estimate was included an environmental study prepared before Congress and President Bush approved the Yucca site for the repository.
Benson said Wednesday that a total project estimate was still being calculated.
The Energy Department in 2001 projected the cost of building and operating the national nuclear repository at about $58 billion. Plans have called for the Yucca site to entomb 77,000 tons of highly radioactive used reactor fuel from commercial nuclear power plants and military installations in 39 states.
The project has in recent months gotten less congressional funding than project planners sought, and project officials have facing questions about e-mails suggesting that scientific findings about the plan were falsified.
The projected opening date has been pushed back from 2010 to 2012 or later.