With a looming Halloween deadline, two more cities have dropped out of the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) mini reactor project, the latest municipal bail out from the Department of Energy-subsidized venture.
Bountiful, Utah, a town that has been on the fence about the project for months now, will hold a final vote Tuesday over whether to pull out or stay in, while Heber Water and Light will vote Wednesday. The deadline to drop out and increase or decrease subscription funding is Saturday.
Four towns have already withdrawn from the project, to be located on the Department of Energy’s 890-square-mile Idaho National Laboratory. Murray pulled out last week, while Kaysville dropped out at the end of September. A Murry city councilman said he believed in the safety of the project, but didn’t trust the price of the venture — a $2 million cost to city taxpayers — wouldn’t continue to grow.
Kaysville expressed similar concerns. Logan and Lehi abandoned ship in August. One utility, Wells Rural Electric Company, has been added to the project since the list of the 30 officially participating cities was announced. Idaho Falls voted last week to stay in the project but cut its subscription in half.
Most cities haven’t expressed concerns over the waste generated by the reactors, but rather the precarious cost of the project.
“This project, like so many other nuclear power projects, could have massive cost overruns and delays,” Rusty Cannon, Vice President of the Utah Taxpayers Association, told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing on Monday. “And those possible future commitments as well as the current commitments are far too great for these municipally owned power companies to bear, in our mind. They should not be acting as seed investors on a project like this.”
UAMPS spokesman LaVarr Webb did not return requests for comment made Monday.
Also known as the Carbon Free Power Project, UAMPS is the first U.S. small-scale nuclear power project.
Any UAMPS withdrawals on Saturday would come just days after the DOE approved a $1.35 billion appropriation for the project’s construction over ten years. The UAMPS project is being facilitated by NuScale, a Portland, Oregon-based company that is majority owned by Fluor Corp.
Some groups, like the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, are concerned about the high-level waste created by the reactors.
