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allow it to function as an autonomous self-financed entity like TVA or the Bonneville Power Administration, with full control of the use of its revenues subject to congressional and other independent oversight and with access to future fee receipts and, eventually, the current corpus of the Nuclear Waste Fund.
8.3.1 Near-Term Non-Legislative Action to Increase Access to Fee Revenues The Commission recognizes that legislative action to create a new waste management organization with full access to the nearly $27 billion balance in the NWF will be difficult in the current political and budgetary climate, despite the fundamental equity arguments for this action. Therefore, we urge the Administration to take prompt action aimed at enabling appropriators to use the annual nuclear waste fee revenues for their intended purpose, free from competition with other spending priorities, while stopping further additions of surplus revenues to the NWF until such access has been guaranteed. We believe this can be accomplished by adopting a combination of measures that are already allowed under existing legislation.187
Specifically, the Administration should (1) change the way in which the nuclear waste fee is collected so that only an amount equal to actual appropriations from the NWF is collected each year, with the remainder retained by utilities in approved trust funds to be available when needed for future use, and (2) work with the congressional budget committees and the Congressional Budget Office to reclassify the fee receipts from mandatory to discretionary so that they can directly offset appropriations for the waste program.188 Taken together, these steps would make the nuclear waste program funding mechanism work essentially as Congress intended in the NWPA, at least for future fee revenues. Each is discussed further below. Change the Timing of Nuclear Waste Fee Collections Under the current approach, the entire 1 mill/kwh fee is collected from contract holders each year (the total collected amounts to approximately $750 million per year) and deposited in the Treasury, independent of the sum actually appropriated from the Fund for use by the waste management program. This annual revenue stream is counted in the federal budget baseline as an offset to mandatory spending, which raises the criticism that
Figure 18. Cumulative Nuclear Waste Fees, Budget Requests, and Appropriations 189 18,000
16,000
Cumulative fee receipts Cumulative budget requests Cumulative Waste Fund plus defense appropriations Cumulative Waste Fund appropriations
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$1,000,000 Year of Expenditure
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8,000
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2,000
0 1983
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R e p o r t t o t h e S e c r e ta r y o f E n e r g y
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