US raises fee for nuclear power plant owners
Date: 31-Mar-03
Country: USA
The NRC is one of the few government agencies that is almost completely self-funded, which means its operating costs are covered by the fees the agency collects from the reactors it regulates and monitoring services it provides.
The agency said the annual reactor fee would be $3.278 million, up from the current $2.849 million fee.
Last year's fee increased by just $96,000. The bigger $429,000 increase in this year's fee is from expenses associated with homeland security issues, an NRC official said.
The NRC must recover $526.3 million, or 94 percent, of its budget for the 2003 spending year that ends Sept. 30.
There are 104 nuclear reactors licensed by the NRC in the United States, with some sites home to several reactors.
The rest of the agency's funding comes, in part, from license fees for research reactors at universities and for facilities that manufacture fuel for nuclear power plants.
The NRC also charges hospitals a fee for making sure equipment used in certain treatment programs, such as chemotherapy, is safe.
Nuclear power plants supply about 20 percent of the electricity in the United States.
Separately, the Energy Department said last week that U.S. nuclear power generation reached a record high in 2002.
The U.S. nuclear industry generated a record 780.2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity last year, up 1 percent from 2001, based on preliminary government numbers.
After declining to its lowest level in four years, nuclear generation and plant capacity have been rising in each year.
Although no nuclear reactors have come on line since 1996, the industry's installed generating capacity at existing plants increased during the last four years by 1,100 megawatts.
The total generating capacity of all U.S. nuclear power plants is 98,159 megawatts. One megawatt can supply enough power to about 1,000 homes.