S.Carolina to sue govt over nuclear waste decision
* SC Attorney General challenges dropped Yucca Mountain plan
* Petitions Nuclear Regulatory Commission
* Plans action in appellate courts in Washington, Virginia
CHARLESTON, S.C. Feb 24 (Reuters) - South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster said on Wednesday he would take legal action to stop President Barack Obama from dropping plans to build a nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada.
Last month the Obama administration announced it was stopping the license application for a long-planned nuclear nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain near Las Vegas, which is opposed by environmental groups.
McMaster said that he would file a petition to intervene with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week and plans to take additional legal action in appellate courts in Washington and Virginia on Friday.
"South Carolina has a vested interest in insuring that the Yucca Mountain licensing proceedings continue, so that the spent fuel and other nuclear material now being temporarily stored in our state will be safely placed in the Yucca Mountain repository, as mandated by the United States Congress," McMaster said in a statement.
The Yucca Mountain site was first chosen by Congress in 1987 as a planned repository for much of the nation's high level radioactive waste that is currently stored at dozens of locations around the country including South Carolina's Savannah River Site.
Reached for comment, McMaster said he planned to file either a temporary restraining order, a writ of mandamus, or both, to either the District of Columbia Court of Appeals or the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., on Friday.
"There seems to be no other alternative ... The Obama administration is attempting to stop a process that was begun many years ago and was confirmed and ordered by federal law," he said.
"We have seven nuclear power plants in South Carolina. The nuclear waste is still there and in temporary storage and has been there since the beginning ... Our position is it ought to go to Yucca Mountain." (Writing by Harriet McLeod; editing by Tim Gaynor and Marguerita Choy)
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As a result of those FY 2010 cuts over 1500 engineers and clerical staff were cut from the project, leaving only a handful of Federal employees and contractors to respond to NRC requests for additional information in support of the filed application and to prepare for hearings. With the certainty of the FY 2011 zero budget, even that remaining handful have begun to depart. When the request for the application’s withdrawal is submitted in about a week, all that would remain for remainder of the Yucca Mountain staff to do is box up all the Projects Records, turn off the lights and find work somewhere else. (Boxing up the records means putting them in the Licensing Support Network (LSN), the database designed to give the public access to them all. Then the database will be shut down because there will be no funds to keep it operating.)
With the departure and the spreading out throughout the country of the entire Yucca Mountain staff, McMaster’s delayed legal action, even if successful in restoring the funds, could not restore in five years, the Project’s momentum so apparent a year and a half ago. It should be noted that nearly all the professional Yucca Mountain staff has found very good employment elsewhere and would not return. A reestablished Project would require hiring a completely new staff that would take a substantial amount of time to get up to speed.
So much for President Obama’s pre-election commitment that decisions on Yucca Mountain will be based upon good science (Something that the NRC was supposed to determine). Instead the fate of Yucca Mountain was based devious political science. So much for the $20 billion remaining in the Nuclear Waste Fund. So much for the commitment to relieve the utilities from keeping the waste on their plant site for an indeterminate number of years. Just keep paying into the fund.
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