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Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s study on nuclear waste storage is inadequate

Watchdogs criticize nuclear storage study; A.G. says NRC didn’t focus on Indian Point lohud.com, 26 Dec 13, State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and his counterparts in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont have given a thumbs-down to the federal government’s draft study on the long-term storage of used nuclear fuel.

A 143-page document filed late last week detailed their concerns, along with those of a Minnesota Native American tribe.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s review, they maintain, was incorrectly focused at the industry level and not individual plants.A federal court in 2012 found the NRC didn’t fully consider the hazards of on-site storage of old fuel at the nation’s nuclear plants, including Indian Point in Buchanan. The court ordered the commission to evaluate the environmental effects of such storage.

Old fuel at Indian Point is kept in spent-fuel pools and dry casks. Both are reinforced against attacks or other calamities but critics have called for moving more old fuel at a faster pace into the casks.The draft study “fails(s) to address these core issues as required by (federal law) and the Court,” the attorneys general and the general counsel for the Prairie Island Indian Community wrote. The study also fails to provide the states, the tribe and the public with plant-by-plant reviews and wrongly relies on a generic approach, they wrote.

The tribe’s reservation is next to the Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant, which was the subject of litigation in the 1970s that lead to how the NRC regulates the storage of old nuclear fuel……..http://www.lohud.com/article/20131225/NEWS/312250023/Watchdogs-criticize-nuclear-storage-study-A-G-says-NRC-didn-t-focus-on-India

December 27, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA, wastes