Reply #32: The first of several laws...

[PamW]

Can you point me to the part of the law that outlaws recycling?
======================

Sec 105 says that there should be a reevaluation of the nuclear fuel
cycle with emphasis on alternatives to separating plutonium.

There were several laws that addressed this issue, and perhaps I don't
have the one that contains the explicit ban.

However, in the late '70s the USA was all set to reprocess and recycle
apent fuel. The forerunner of DOE, the ERDA, had filed the GESMO - the
Generic Environmetal Statement on Mixed Oxide. That was the required
environmental impact statement for the use of Mixed Oxide or MOX fuel.

That all came to a crashing halt when Congress outlawed reprocessing and
recycling, although I may have cited the wrong law with regard to the
explicit ban.

I absolutely hate attempting to parse all the legalese. The prohibition
may still be buried in there somewhere, it's just I can't stand to dig for
it. ( They always "hide" the true agenda in some obscure clause ).

Congress wrote other laws, like the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1984(?) and
the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1987. The latter, 1987 Act, is the one that
says the stated policy of the USA would be a "once through" nuclear fuel cycle
with the waste then going to the Yucca Mountain repository. Prior to this Act,
DOE had been considering multiple sites, and the 1987 Act is the one that says
Yucca would be the one and only repository.

PamW