Appeals Court Rejects Yucca Mountain Suit; Plaintiffs Sue NRC

摘要

On July 1, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the lawsuit filed by the states of Washington and South Carolina and by other petitioners to keep the Yucca Mountain project alive was premature, given that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not yet decided whether the U.S. Department of Energy can withdraw its license application for the Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste/spent nuclear fuel repository. In the rul ing, the court said that there is "a lack of finality and ripeness until the commission either acts on the DOE's motion to withdraw or rules on the license application."Congress selected the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada for the nation's HLW repository in 1987 in the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act. Since that time, the state of Nevada has been waging a focused battle against the project. In 2008, the DOE submitted a license application for the facility with the NRC. In 2009, at the beginning of the Obama administration, Nevada got some high-level support from the new president, who announced that the project was, in his opinion, unsafe, and that a new plan for the disposal of waste and spent fuel should be developed.