Nuke lobby wins (Yucca Mountain lives)

[jpak]

http://www.newsreview.com/reno/content?oid=1450524

Representatives of the nuclear power industry and of states seeking to unload their nuclear waste praised the legal arm of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for halting an Obama administration effort to bring the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump project to an end.

The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board rejected the administration’s effort to withdraw an application for licensing of the dump that had been submitted by the Bush administration in June 2008. The board members said U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu already has the authority to withdraw the application. However, Chu withdrawing it would not kill the project. The Energy Department was seeking to have the application withdrawn “with prejudice,” which meant it could not be re-filed, conceivably killing the project.

State officials in various states with nuclear power plants praised the decision to keep the application active. Idaho and Washington, which have dumps of their own, also praised the decision because they want the content of their dumps moved into a Nevada dump.

The panel used an argument from Vietnam—“We can’t pull out now because we’ve invested so much already”—in making its decision.

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