The glow of Yucca Mountain

I'm not sure why this is a loss for Nevada, but that seems to be the spin I read in the news as a federal appeals court rejected claims the Yucca Mountain waste site is unconstitutional, but stated the government has to protect the public for longer than the propsed 10,000 years.

The court said that the EPA's standard calling for protection from radiation up to 10,000 years "is not based or consistent with the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences," which had concluded that the danger to the public goes years beyond that.

In arguments in January, lawyers for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which had challenged the EPA standard, argued that many of the isotopes in the waste would reach their peak radiation levels and be most dangerous up to 300,000 years into the future.

Nevada will appeal the ruling.

Of course this stuff has to go somewhere. But to lower the treshold of safety that low seems ludicrous, especially in light of things happening near Columbia, South Carolina

Fifteen tanks holding deadly atomic waste at a nuclear weapons complex along the Savannah River have cracked, rusted or leaked, according to federal inspection reports.

(snip)

Westinghouse Savannah River Co., which runs the site for the U.S. Department of Energy, says some tanks are within 8 to 10 feet of the water table, raising concerns. But Dean Campbell, a spokesman for Westinghouse, says the government does not know of any tanks that currently are leaking.

(snip)

The Energy Department wants Congress to allow it to empty most of the waste from tanks and fill them with a grout intended to reduce the threat remaining material can pose to groundwater.

But critics of the DOE plan say the tanks' poor condition shows the need to empty the containers completely.

Both facts seem to show the US Government does not really want to deal with issue of nuclear waste in an enviromentally safe way. Just sweep it under the mountain and forget about the whole thing.