US govt embroiled in lawsuits over nuclear wastes

The litigation itself has been expensive for the government. DOJ has spent $29 million in attorney costs, $111 million on experts and $52 million in litigation support costs, with no end in sight.

DOJ in Settlement Talks for Nuclear Waste Cases, The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times, David Ingram. July 27, 2010 After more than a decade of litigation with nuclear utilities nationwide, the U.S. Department of Justice is interested in settling claims related to the storage of spent nuclear fuel.The utilities have been suing the federal government for breach of contract since the late 1990s. Back then, the government was supposed to have begun accepting nuclear waste for long-term storage at a site such as the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada. But it has yet to accept any, leaving the companies to pay ongoing storage costs.
A total of 72 lawsuits have been filed, of which 22 have reached judgment in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and 11 have settled. The government’s liability so far is $2 billion, DOJ says, and that’s expected to grow in light of the Obama administration’s 2009 decision to abandon the Yucca Mountain project……
The litigation itself has been expensive for the government. DOJ has spent $29 million in attorney costs, $111 million on experts and $52 million in litigation support costs, with no end in sight.

DOJ in Settlement Talks for Nuclear Waste Cases – The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times

1.This Month

United Nations: demasking the Torture of Julian Assange. Rico Brouwer and Nils Melzer

Three Mile Island (& Fukushima) Lies & Cover-Ups w/ Gundersen & Wasserman

Energy efficiency – theme for July 2019

Energy efficiency represents the single largest potential contributor to global emissions reduction, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA 2017). It should be a key part of the global energy strategy, for several reasons:

It could reduce global electric demand by more than 20 per cent, based on current rates in the U.S. power sector, while maintaining high levels of services such as heating and lighting.
It avoids the need for increased energy, capacity and grid services, making it the least expensive way to decarbonise at scale.
It can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by billions of tonnes.

A dramatic example of the power of energy efficiency is lighting. In 2017 the United States passed the milestone of 1 billion LED and CFL lights installed, avoiding 142 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide emissions, at a cost of about $7 per ton of avoided carbon dioxide. In contrast, the cumulative installed capacity of rooftop solar reached 8,000 MW in 2017, saving 8 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide, at a cost of $360 per ton. Lighting efficiency thus yielded almost 18 times the avoided carbon dioxide, at about 2 per cent the cost per ton of rooftop solar.

Google provides another example of the power of energy efficiency. Its data centers now use 50 per cent less energy than the average data center, according to the company. Google also developed an improved chip, the TPU, which performs 83 times better than standard CPUs. The new chip allowed Google to reduce power consumption at its data centers by a factor of 30—far exceeding the effect on Google’s carbon footprint of all of the company’s renewable energy purchases. ” – John Woolard, Eco Business, 10 June 2019

nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope