The owners of the former Connecticut Yankee nuclear power plant in Haddam have received a $39.7 million settlement from the U.S. Department of Energy over the federal government’s failure to move nuclear waste to a permanent repository.
In 1998, the Energy Department was supposed to start collecting spent uranium from nuclear reactors around the country and put that waste into a permanent repository. That promise never came to fruition, and the country’s nuclear power owners filed separate lawsuits in 2002 and 2007 over the federal government’s continued failure to remove the waste.
The government did not appeal the latest U.S. Court of Appeals judgment from the 2002 case and has paid out money to all the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The amounts include $39.7 million to Connecticut Yankee, $38.3 million to the Yankee Atomic Electric Co. in Massachusetts, and $81.7 million to Maine Yankee.
Those three Yankee companies are owned collectively by New England’s electric utilities, including Berlin-based Connecticut Light & Power and New Haven-based United Illuminating.
The proceeds from the lawsuit will be credits to electric ratepayers in the utilities’ service territories.
The 2007 lawsuit, which has not been resolved, the three Yankee companies are asking for $247 million in additional damages. The companies expect to file another lawsuit in 2013 since the federal government still hasn’t come to collect the nuclear waste.
