nuclear-news

USA’s 70,000 metric tons of radioactive trash

they sould stop making the stuff!

Highly reactive nuclear waste seeks permanent home ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER, December 27th, 2013, By TERI SFORZA “………; two things happened last month that give hope to those who want Yucca to open for business:  The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered its staff to finish a safety evaluation report for Yucca Mountain, and it will spend $11 million from the Nuclear Waste Fund to do it, and,  a federal appeals court told the government to quit collecting $750 million a year from consumers for said Nuclear Waste Fund, since, you know, the federal government has failed to permanently dispose of a single gram of nuclear waste for more than 50 years.

This all comes as the city of San Clemente officially implores the federal government to create some sort of safe repository for nuclear waste, and to give first priority to the stuff stored at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station because of our area’s “unique circumstances” (read: vulnerability to earthquakes and dense population).

“I’ll take any sign of forward momentum on Yucca Mountain as positive, including this one,” said San Clemente City Councilwoman Lori Donchak by email shortly after the news broke. “The immediate need is for a safety-evaluation report to see if the site can do its job. It’s not clear that the money available is enough to get that done and unfortunately no indicators that renewed funding is in the works in Washington…..

the importance of some sort of answer to the nation’s acute nuclear-waste-disposal-question grows more pressing every day: Some 70,000 metric tons of the poisonous stuff have piled up in pools and dry casks all across America, and more than 116 million people live within the 10-mile evacuation zone around the nuclear power plants that have created it.

That’s more than one of every three people in the United States.

And the financial cost of paralysis is high: About 80 lawsuits have been filed against the feds over broken promises to start accepting spent nuclear fuel by 1998, theDepartment of Energy had paid out $2.6 billion in damages to utility companies as of 2012, and it faces another $19.7 billion in liabilities through 2020, according to the General Accounting Office……

December 28, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | wastes