Posted on 03/22/2011 7:56:30 PM PDT by fightinJAG
-Lawyers for Washington state and South Carolina on Tuesday accused President Barack Obama of exceeding his constitutional power in closing the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository.
Washington state Assistant Attorney General Andrew Fitz told a federal appellate court that Obama's refusal to fund continued development of the Nevada site violates the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act.
"He's acting unconstitutionally under the separation of powers doctrine because he doesn't have the authority under the statute," Fitz told a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. "He had no authority to reverse it."
In 1987 amendments to the nuclear-waste law, Congress designated Yucca Mountain as the central site for radioactive debris from the nation's 104 commercial reactors - and from nuclear-weapons sites that have held even more toxic waste since the Cold War.
The government has spent $10 billion developing the Yucca site, but Obama has stripped funding for it from his last two budget proposals to Congress.
Republicans, who have proposed legislation to revive the repository, accuse Obama of making a political gesture to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, whose residents dislike the notion of burying radioactive debris from across the country at a subterranean site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
Harry Reid has a suppository we can stuff nuclear waste in!
Very well said fightinJAG (and depressing)
My brother was the head of the Nevada Test Site Survey Dept.
ten years ago. He was in charge of the Yucca Mountain survey.
It is a very geologically safe area for a repository.
Unfortunately, the Eco-Fascists have, once again, sabotaged our technologically advanced economy and prospects of a vibrant future.
In Obama’s world, laws were made to be broken.
“About as well thought out as Guantanamo...”
Ahhh, but if we make Guantanamo a nuclear waste depository, we kill two birds with one stone—— brilliant!
Go on - give me one good reason why not.
I would have been working for Bechtel Neveda, which runs the electric system for the entire site. Wasn’t much to it at the time, and judging from the changes, there probably still isn’t.
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