FEDERAL APPEALS COURT FINDS AGAINST SECURITY, STABILIZATION PLANS FOR YUCCA NUCLEAR REPOSITORY
11 July 2004

The federal appeals court for the D.C. circuit ruled last week that the plans for containing contamination from nuclear waste stored at the proposed Yucca Mountain, Nevada, facility, are inadequate and cannot proceed as written. The ruling is seen as a major setback for the government's controversial plan to remove all nuclear waste in the U.S. to the single repository under Yucca Mountain.

The state of Nevada has been fighting the plans, claiming they subject the people of Nevada to an undue amount of long-term physical peril. The court rejected the state's constitutional argument against federal imposition of such a project, but raised the stakes significantly for the Department of Energy. The ruling requires that the federal government engineer protections against radiation release for a period in excess of 10,000 years, after which much of the waste, especially in such large quantities, will still pose serious risks.

Robert Loux, head of Nevada's nuclear projects team, is quoted as saying "We think the project's effectively dead". Secretary of Energy Abraham said he welcomed the ruling as a confirmation of the government's site selection, but Nevada officials claimed the ruling provides new grounds for lawsuits on environmental impact, public health, and transportation security.

Some news sources are focusing their coverage, or at least their headlines, on the part of the ruling that strikes down the Nevada challenge to the selection of the site. The Houston Chronicle headline reads "Nevada loses nuclear waste appeal, even though the text of their article was largely the same as other outlets that used, reprinted or excerpted the Washington Post story.

The Department of Energy has sought to convince the Congress, the state of Nevada, the courts and the public, that the construction of the Yucca repository will actually protect public health and create a safer condition nationwide. Many assume the site is extremely remote, though it is only 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

In the absence of such a storage facility, current standards have nuclear power facilities building their own massive concrete containment facilities. Several are already in use around the country, and there has not been any such comprehensive judicial hearing of the standards or the long-term viability of such containment facilities.

The ruling was specifically critical of the Environmental Protection Agency, which it cited as having disregarded findings by the National Academy of Sciences, suggesting that any nuclear repository should be made secure well beyond 10,000 years. The San Francisco Chronicle cites the court's admonition, saying the EPA "unabashedly rejected NAS's findings, and then went on to promulgate a dramatically different standard, one that the academy had expressly rejected.