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Nuclear waste reprocessing plan melting down?

Nuclear waste reprocessing plan melting down?  Examiner.com  Robyn Monaghan May 25,

The Obama administration may be melting down a program that would have shipped deadly radioactive wastes from around the world to a reprocessing facility eyed for Chicago’s Southwest suburbs.

“The program has been terminated,” Department of Energy spokesman Brian Quirke told Chicago Page One Examiner last week about the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

That happened in late March, when GNEP was chopped from the new budget, he said.

The controversial Global Nuclear Energy Partnership [GNEP] was a pet project of the DOE during the Bush years. It called for transporting radioactive waste from the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors and from 25 foreign countries signed on as “GNEP Partners.”…………………..
……………………Slicing GNEP from the budget doesn’t mean the DOE is completely abandoning the idea of nuclear waste re-processing. The budget funnels $145 million for the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative, for conducting research on “proliferation-resistant” recycling and nuclear waste reduction technologies. The 2009 budget also includes $143 million for “defense nuclear waste disposal” activities, which some sources say means to developing Yucca Mountain………………………….

It may technically correct to say GNEP is terminated, said David Kraft, with the Chicago-based Nuclear Energy and information Service. In fact, the new administration has simply renamed and re-budgeted it.

‘You can dress up a pig in silk and marry it and call it your wife, but it’s still going to be a pig,” Kraft said.
Opponents say nuclear reprocessing nuclear waste has devastated local and regional environments wherever it’s done – in the UK, France, and Russia.  They say France’s decision to reprocess reactor fuel has contaminated seas as far as the Arctic Circle and point to studies that radioactive discharges from La Hague in France contributed to elevated rates of leukemia among young people close to the site…………………………..Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu is Nuclear is promoting nuclear as “clean” in global warming terms, despite “huge issues associated with the waste, in its transport, reprocessing emissions, and storage,” Headington said.

Chicago Page One Examiner: Nuclear waste reprocessing plan melting down? CHICAGO; MORRIS; NAPERVILLE; AURORA

May 26, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | antinuclear, nuclear, radioactive, uranium