NEW YORK — Something could be missing from your next electric bill: a fee that electric customers have been paying for 31 years to fund a federal nuclear waste site that doesn’t exist.
The Energy Department will stop charging the fee by court order on Friday. The amount is only a small percentage of most customers’ bills, but it adds up to $750 million a year. The fund now holds $37 billion.
The money was collected to build a long-term disposal site for the waste generated by the nation’s nuclear power plants that is, by law, the federal government’s responsibility.
The site was supposed to have opened in 1998, but there is no such site nor even any tangible plans for one.
Don’t expect a refund, however. The latest Energy Department strategy, laid out in a report last year, is to have a site designed by 2042 and built by 2048.
The fee, a penny for every 10 kilowatt-hours of electricity, is charged to nuclear operators and then passed on to customers .
In 2002 Congress approved Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as a site for a national nuclear waste dump and $9.5 billion was withdrawn from the fund to develop the project, according to the Government Accountability Office. But the project has been criticized as inadequate and flawed and is fiercely opposed by Nevadans. President Obama, fulfilling a campaign promise, cut funding for the program, withdrew its license application, and dismantled the office that was working on it.