Nuclear clean-up to cost $1 billion

Press, 10 November 1980, Page 8

Nuclear clean-up to cost $1 billion

NZPA-Reuter Middletown, Pennsylvania

The General Public Utilities Corporation has announced that it has doubled to about $lOOO million the projected cost of cleaning up after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, in March last year. In August, the utility estimated the cost at $5OO million but said that estimate did not allow for inflation.

The cost has climbed to $750 million in 1980 without inflation, it said, and 10 per cent a year- inflation increased this to $lOOO million.

The company said insurance covered $3OO million of the estimated clean-up costs.

Repairing the damaged reactor and getting it back on line would cost another $260million as previously estimated, though no allowance had been made for inflation in that figure.

In the wake of a Washington State vote that will close off a nuclear dump site to out-of-state wastes, officials at Three Mile Island have begun making plans to store the damaged plant’s wastes on the island itself. “We’ve got a lot of acres on the island, so we could keep storing the waste material here for up to, say, 15 years,” said Doug Bedell, a spokesman for Metropolitan Edison, the plant operator.. Tractor-trailers have been

hauling tightly packaged radioactive debris about three times a month from the island to the Hanford, Washington, Federal reservation, the only waste-disposal site in the nation that will accept such material for burial.

Last week, Washington voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative to bar out-of-state non-medical waste shipments to Hanford, beginning next July.