Washington State sues feds over dropping Yucca Mountain as nuclear waste site

(Vermont Business Magazine) The State of Washington has filed suit against the federal government for dropping its plan to store highly radioactive nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The Nevada site was intended to house spent fuel from all the nuclear power plants in the United States, including Vermont Yankee. Currently, all spent fuel from every plant, including those that have been decommissioned, is still stored on-site.
Washington State is particularly sensitive to this issue because the Hanford Nuclear Weapons Reservation, created in 1943, is one of the most notorious nuclear facilities in the country. It houses 53 million gallons of nuclear waste in underground tanks, up to a third of which are confirmed or suspected of leaking. A $12.3 billion recovery system was built at Hanford specifically to process the material for the Yucca Mountain repository. Now, that waste, just as with the spent fuel, has no where to go. The federal government has been working for more than 50 years to find a site highly radioactive waste, but even with enormous federal incentives, no state has volunteered to host the facility. The Yucca Mountain site's location and geology has also been questioned. While on federal land near the former nuclear weapons test site, it is less than a 100 miles from Las Vegas. Also, the mountain itself is a 10 million-year-old "drift." (See Vermont Business Magazine story from August 2004 by Timothy McQuiston)
The On February 1, 2010, DOE filed a motion with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to stay the pending proceedings on DOE s Yucca Mountain repository license application filed June 2008 until DOE s planned motion to withdraw is resolved. The motion to stay the proceedings was granted on February 16, 2010. On March 3, 2010, DOE filed a motion to withdraw the license application with prejudice.
President Obama and the Department of Energy are working to restart America s nuclear industry to help meet our energy and climate challenges and create thousands of new jobs. The Administration is fully committed to ensuring that long-term storage obligations for nuclear waste are met. No nuclear plant license has been filed since 1978.
Meanwhile, at Vermont Yankee in Vernon, the spent fuel is being stored in both the original pool and in above-ground "dry casks," which are steel and cement containers. At the nearby, decommissioned Yankee Rowe (Massachusetts) plant, all the spent fuel is stored in the dry casks.
The President has made clear that Yucca Mountain is not an option for waste storage. The Blue Ribbon Commission on America s Nuclear Future, led by Congressman Lee Hamilton and General Brent Scowcroft, will conduct a comprehensive review of policies for managing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, and will provide recommendations for developing a safe, long-term solution to managing the Nation s used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste.
On March 3, 2010, the Department of Energy filed a motion with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to withdraw the license application for a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain with prejudice. The President s fiscal year 2011 budget request eliminates funding for the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. The Office of Nuclear Energy will lead used fuel activities previously performed by OCRWM.
Source: US DOE. 4.5.2010