WISHING NUKE WASTE AWAY

NRC’s “Wishful Thinking” That Geological Disposal Site Will be Available When Needed for Highly Radioactive Used Nuclear Reactor Fuel Challenged in Federal Court; NRC’s Assumptions About the Impacts of Waste Disposal are Obsolete – An Environmental Impact Statement is Needed to Comply With Federal Law, Groups Say
February 24, 2011 (Southern Alliance for Clean Energy)

"Less than a week after three states went to court to dispute the safety issues of storing nuclear waste on site at reactor sites, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) faces two major new legal challenges to the agency’s 2010 findings that used nuclear reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste (HLW) can be disposed of safely on a long-term basis.

"…Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and…the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (BREDL), Riverkeeper, and Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE)…are asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to overturn two NRC rules that conclude that storage and disposal of spent (or used) nuclear reactor fuel and HLW generated by spent fuel reprocessing pose no significant safety or environmental concerns…"

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"The environmental organizations’ lawsuits have a different focus from the lawsuits filed by New York, Vermont and Connecticut on February 16, 2011. While the states criticize the NRC’s Temporary Storage Rule for generalizing that temporary storage of spent fuel at reactor sites is benign and failing to address problems at individual reactor sites, the environmental groups will focus on challenging the NRC’s finding that spent reactor fuel will be permanently disposed of safely.

"The groups are arguing that the NRC’s ‘confidence’ that a geologic repository ‘will be available …when necessary’ is so vague as to be meaningless, and without foundation in the facts and history of the U.S. geologic repository program…"

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"The organizations will also argue that the NRC must prepare a comprehensive and up-to-date environmental analysis of the health and environmental impacts of spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste disposal. The NRC no longer has any factual basis for its long-held position that radioactive releases from a spent nuclear fuel repository would be zero. The NRC’s assumption of essentially zero release depends on the assumptions of 30 years ago that (a) spent fuel will be reprocessed and that (b) high-level waste will be disposed of in a salt formation.

"However, the U.S. government’s current policy is to dispose of spent fuel rather than reprocess it; and the NRC now admits that high-level radioactive waste should not be disposed of in salt deposits for technical reasons. It is generally acknowledged in U.S. government studies that radiation doses will be greater than zero in any geologic context other than salt…The groups expect the briefing on the pair of petitions to take place this spring or summer."