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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A third utility in the Private Fuel Storage consortium has announced it will withhold future support of the nuclear waste storage site proposed for western Utah.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said the announcement Tuesday by Florida Power & Light means 57 percent of the PFS investments are now on hold, and he believes the remaining companies will not be able to move to the construction phase.
"It would be a tremendous costly burden for them to do this on their own," Hatch told the Deseret Morning News.
PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin said the repository proposed for the Goshutes' reservation in Skull Valley always was going to be done in phases, and there are a lot of other companies with storage needs that could sign on in the future to move the project to its next stage.
"The future of the project is not in the hands of these eight (utilities making up PFS)," she said "We always knew they were either going to sign on as customers or not."
She said like any big project, the market will ultimately decide when the right time would be for PFS to be built.
Florida Power & Light said it would not help pay to build the site as long as progress is being made toward solving the nuclear waste problem.
"After carefully evaluating our goals, FPL has concluded that at this time PFS is no longer in our strategic interest and that for the foreseeable future we will put no further effort into developing that project," said Lew Hay, CEO and president for the FPL Group in a letter to Hatch that was released by his office.
Last week, Southern Co. announced it was dropping out of PFS entirely and XCel Energy reaffirmed that it no longer needed the storage space and said it would not provide any money for construction.
Some other PFS partners told The Salt Lake Tribune in September, after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted a license to the site, that licensing had taken too long and they no longer needed the storage space.
In a 2002 letter, six of the partners, including Southern and FPL, said they would not pay for construction as long as progress is being made on a permanent site in Yucca Mountain, Nev.
Southern California Edison spokesman Ray Golden said the company has not made any financial contributions to PFS since 1999. It originally joined because it did not have dry storage for nuclear waste on site, but now it does, so the need for PFS is not as great.
"We have no immediate plan to store at PFS," he told the News, adding that a decision on whether to move forward with investments in construction would have to be made at that point.
Todd Schneider, spokesman for First Energy, based in Akron, Ohio, said the company's commitment through the licensing phase is still valid, and it would look at PFS's potential and Yucca's progress before making any other decisions.
Diane Park, a spokeswoman for Entergy Nuclear, told The Associated Press last week that her company is an active PFS partner and has not decided what its future relationship with PFS will be.
Consortium member Genoa Fuel Tech, a subsidiary of Dairyland Power Cooperative, has a non-operating nuclear power plant along the Mississippi River that it wants to decommission, but it has no place to put the waste.
Charles San Crainte, Dairyland Power vice president of generation, told the News that it "judges PFS to be a better decision for us." He said over the 11 years the site has been in play, the storage needs of those involved have changed, but his company still has an immediate need for a storage option.
(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)