Posted on 07/09/2004 9:40:50 AM PDT by Momaw Nadon
WASHINGTON - A federal appeals court on Friday rejected Nevada's arguments against a building a nuclear waste site in the state, but ordered the government to develop a plan to protect the public against radiation releases beyond the proposed 10,000 years.
The three-judge panel dismissed claims by Nevada that the Bush administration's plan to build the Yucca Mountain waste site was unconstitutional and said that actions by the Energy Department and President Bush leading up to approval of the waste site were not subject to review by the court.
In a victory for Nevada, however, the court rejected the government standard that the public would have to be protected from radiation leaks only for 10,000 years. It said the compliance period for the radiation standards would have to be developed well beyond that period.
The 100-page decision by the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was a major blow to Nevada's attempt to block construction of the repository planned for 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The state was likely to appeal the decision and also has vowed to continue fighting the case before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must issued a permit for the facility. The site is planned to store underground 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste, mostly spent reactor fuel from commercial power plants.
Congress approved the Yucca Mountain site in 2002, overriding an attempt by Nevada to block the project.
While rejecting the heart of Nevada's arguments, the appeals court upheld arguments by environmentalists that the Environmental Protection Agency requirements for safeguarding the environment from radiation were inadequate and would have to be strengthened.
The court said that the EPA's standard calling for protection from radiation up to 10,000 years "is not based or consistent with the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences," which had concluded that the danger to the public goes years beyond that.
In arguments in January, lawyers for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which had challenged the EPA standard, argued that many of the isotopes in the waste would reach their peak radiation levels and be most dangerous up to 300,000 years into the future.
The National Academy of Sciences had reached a similar conclusion in an examination of the standard. The court noted that the EPA's own policy required that the radiation standard must be consistent with the National Academy of Sciences conclusions.
"We're absolutely thrilled," said Geoffrey Fettus, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
There was no immediate comment from either Nevada officials nor the Energy Department.
...but ordered the government to develop a plan to protect the public against radiation releases beyond the proposed 10,000 years.
Obviously, there will be absolutely no technological advances over the next 10,000 tears that might allow the prevention of any problems beyond that time. We've got to have the solutions in place now.
What does France do with its Nuclear waste now that Irag is no longer their friend.
This has got to be the single stupidest statement ever made about radioactivity. The radwaste is at its MOST DANGEROUS (i.e. most radioactive) "now", and gets less dangerous at any moment in the future. The longer it sits, the less radioactive it becomes. Do these fools actually think the radioactivity GETS WORSE with time??? Sure, some specific longer-lived isotopes may become a larger fraction of the waste at a later time, BUT THE TOTAL RADIOACTIVITY GOES DOWN.
bump for later jumping up and down on the pro-nuke side
The dumbest thing in this whole debate is the short-sightedness of people. They are worried about 10,000 years from now...or 300,000 years from now. Get real. Do they think that we will be the same in 1,000 years...or 10,000? Don't they understand that technology will change BEFORE any of this remotely becomes a problem? Look at how we have advanced over the last 1,000 years and think about 1,000 years form now. In 1,000 years we will have the technology to transport it into the sun or a trillion miles away. Matter of fact...in 500 years it probably won't still be in that mountain...we probably will have developed some technology to turn it into ice cream. :-)
---we will more likely have used technology to use it as an energy source, as we should now be doing---
This is what the anti-nuclear power people are now reduced to. Anyone brighter than a cabbage would be embarrassed by this kind of nonsense, but there they still are, yammering away against the cleanest energy option on the horizon. Idiots.
I thought that's how Perrier got its fizz.
"Spent fuel from the reactors is sent to Cogema's 1600 t/yr La Hague plant in Normandy for reprocessing. This extracts the plutonium and uranium, leaving high-level wastes which are vitrified and stored there for later disposal. The plutonium is shipped to the 120 t/yr Melox plant at Marcoule for prompt fabrication into mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel, which can be used in about 30 reactors in Europe. The recovered uranium is re-enriched at Pierrelatte."
They recycle it and use it to generate more electricity, leaving a byproduct that is only dangerously radioactive for a few hundred years.
According to Follywood, Nevada will be under two miles of ice about that time and the survivors will be living in Mexico 1000 miles away.
BUMP
Hmmmmm.....I was just talking to my wife's cousin yesterday about the dump. He lives near the site (in Tonopah) and I asked him how he and the people in the area feel about the dump. They're all for it and are planning for its inevitable creation. IOW, the people most affected by the nuke dump site WANT IT THERE.
By the way, the "Bush administration's plan" to build ther nuclear depository at Yucca Mountain has been around for a couple of decades and was approved by both houses of Congress. In fact, before the Democrats try to exploit the issue to campaign in Nevada (which is what Clinton did when he won narrow pluralities in the state in 1992 and 1996), they should know that Senator John Edwards voted for the Yucca Mountain nuclear depository.
A company I used to work for pioneered the vitrified nuclear waste process and I worked on a small part of the project.
When it's done right it will last for ever, and unless you grind the glass down to powder and extract the waste it isn't going anywhere.
US Nuclear Power Debate
... The Bush administration also wants to explore new technology to recycle nuclear
fuel, increasing its efficiency and possibly reducing its danger. ...
Other info:
Numatec - the Tri-Cities' 'French connection'
... Numatec other parent is Cogema, the owner and operator of facilities used to produce
and recycle nuclear fuel, including many designed and built by SGN. ...
Nuclear Electricity
... gas equivalent). • Uranium offers a long-term source of energy. Unlike
fossil fuels, we can recycle nuclear fuel. We can recover ...
[MMA Alumni] Helping out MMA Nuclear Employed Alumni
... Many MMA Grads are employed in the Nuclear Power industry, ever since President Carter
killed the national plans to recycle nuclear fuel as was always intended ...
[PDF] U. S. Nuclear Waste Policy: Reaching Critical Mass
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
... An Aside: Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Overseas In addition to the United States,
only two other countries don't recycle nuclear fuel as a matter of national ...
Salon.com Technology | Nukes now!
... Other countries, such as Japan and France -- which gets about 80 percent of its
electricity from nuclear power -- recycle nuclear fuel, but President Ford ...
That was my first thought too. Why in the heck is the writer crediting the current administration for this plan? </rhetorical question>
Why are we not able to do the same thing? I cannot believe that France is ahead of us in this regard.
President Carter banned it, in an effort to get other countries to "follow our lead" in the realm of nuclear non-proliferation. Of course, most other countries with nuclear power plants don't have vast stockpiles of coal that they can afford to throw away their nuclear fuel after using only a few percent of its energy capacity.
There's more heat energy in the naturally occurring thorium and uranium in coal ASH than there was in the coal that was burned to produce it. We have an unlimited supply of energy, if only we'd have the will to use it.
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