nuclear-news

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission yesterday updated its “Nuclear Waste Confidence Rule,” expressing “confidence” that commercial irradiated nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste (implying reprocessing) can be stored safely and securely, either on-site or off-site, for 60 years after operation licenses have expired at atomic reactors.

Added to 60 years of operations (40 year original licenses plus 20 years of extended operations — NRC has rubberstamped approval for all 59 such license extensions applied for thus far), that adds up to a whopping 120 years of on-site storage, in pools and/or dry casks. That’s over half the age of the United States as a country, going backwards in time!

But the “first cupful” of high-level radioactive waste, generated by Enrico Fermi in 1942 during the Manhattan Project, has not been “safely and securely” dealt with in nearly 70 years! And suitable geology for a “safe and secure” permanent dumpsite has not been found in over 50 years of searching!

Especially considering the Obama administration’s wise decision to cancel the Yucca Mountain dump, and NRC’s removal of any date certain for the opening of the first deep geologic repository in the U.S., it’s now all too clear that the “Nuclear Waste Confidence Rule” is nothing other than false confidence, or, even worse, a Nuclear Waste Confidence Game, a con game, an elaborate swindling operation in which advantage is taken of the confidence which the victim, the American people, puts in the swindler, the NRC.

This latest decision will now block any attempt by environmental groups or concerned citizens to challenge the generation of irradiated nuclear fuel at atomic reactors, as in new reactor licensing proceedings or old reactor license extension proceedings, for NRC now considers the matter closed.

It shows that NRC should stand for “Negligible Remaining Credibility.” As “people’s historian” Howard Zinn oft reminded, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that, when government becomes inimical to the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, citizens have the right and indeed the duty to alter or abolish that government. Such a founding principle raises a various serious question concerning what must be done about NRC’s rogue behavior.

While we all mull that one over, concerned citizens should contact U.S. House Energy and Environment Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey (D-MA), as well as U.S. House Domestic Affairs Subcommittee Chairman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), urging that they launch investigative oversight hearings into this latest NRC “favor” for the nuclear power industry — approving unlimited generation of forever deadly high-level radioactive waste, while blocking citizen interventions seeking to prevent it.