NRC pleads insufficient funds to resume Yucca dump licensing proceeding

Yucca Mountain, as framed by a Western Shoshone Indian sweat lodge. Photo by Gabriela Bulisova.As reported by the Las Vegas Review Journal, despite a ruling by a three-judge panel from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals that the Yucca Mountain dump licensing proceeding should be resumed, a lawyer for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has admitted that there are not enough funds in the coffers to do so, with no relief in sight. The Obama administration, along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), have zeroed out funding for the Yucca Mountain Project for several years.

According to U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) plans, the Yucca dump was to have taken 90% commercial irradiated nuclear fuel (63,000 metric tons), and 10% (7,000 metric tons) DOE jurisdiction wastes (mostly nuclear weapons reprocessing high-level radioactive waste). Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, as Amended, only after a second dumpsite would be opened in the eastern U.S., could more waste than that first 70,000 metric tons then have been dumped at Yucca.

Yucca is located next door to the Nevada Test Site (NTS), where around over 100 full-scale atmospheric nuclear bomb blasts, and many hundreds more full-scale underground nuclear bomb blasts, took place from 1951 to 1992. Even since 1992, right up to the present day, "sub-critical" nuclear weapons test explosions (employing conventional explosives and plutonium) are still conducted at the NTS.

The Review Journal reported that the State of Nevada has vowed to fight on if the licensing proceeding is resumed:

"...Halstead [Director of the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects] offered assurance that Nevada's legal team is prepared for a fight if the appeals panel signals resumption of the hearings. 'If they restart the licensing proceedings, we're ready to bloody them up on 200-plus contentions, and 100 of those are really, really strong,' he said. 'This is not going to be a cakewalk through the license application.'"

As reported by the Aiken Standard, however, Aiken County, South Carolina -- home to large amounts of high-level radioactive waste at the Savannah River Site nuclear weapons complex -- is arguing the licensing proceeding should resume post haste, with whatever funding is available. Aiken County, the State of South Carolina, and the State of Washington sued the federal government, to force the resumption of the Yucca licensing proceeding.

Ironically enough, while Aiken County and the State of South Carolina seek to export their high-level radioactive wastes to Yucca Mountain, Nevada, pro-nuclear boosters are simultaneously volunteering -- and lobbying the federal government -- to import large quantitites of commercial irradiated nuclear fuel for "centralized interim storage," and even reprocessing, at the Savannah River Site.