Three states sue NRC over Nuclear Waste Con Game

The States of New York, Vermont, and Connecticut today filed lawsuits against the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's December 2010 update to its Nuclear Waste Confidence Rule. NRC's Nuclear Waste Confidence Game (a con game is any elaborate swindling operation in which advantage is taken of the confidence the victim reposes in the swindler) started in 1984 (appropriately enough, in the Orwellian sense), when NRC ruled that the generation of irradiated nuclear fuel was reasonable, given that it had "confidence" that a repository would open by 2007 to 2009. In 1990, NRC revised its "confidence" date to 2025, where it remained till the December update, when a date-certain was removed entirely. NRC's current con game holds that waste can remain safely stored on-site for at least 120 years (60 years of operations, and 60 years post-shutdown). However, the NRC Commissioners have ordered NRC staff to investigate "confidence" levels of "safe" storage on-site for much longer time periods, into the centuries. Of course, all this "confidence" willfully ignores the safety, security, and environmental risks of on-site pool storage and dry cask storage, none of which was designed to withstand severe terrorist attacks, for example. Three close calls to heavy load drops -- at Prairie Island, Palisades, and Vermont Yankee -- have risked sudden drain downs of pool cooling water, which would lead quickly to radioactive waste infernos unleashing up to 100% of the cesium-137 content of pools (tens of millions of curies, as compared to the 2.4 million curies of cesium-137 released at Chernobyl), according to NRC staff itself. A 2001 NRC pool fire study estimated that 25,000 people could die downwind of a pool fire from latent cancer, with deaths occurring as far downwind as 500 miles away. An earlier 1997 NRC study put the casualty figures much higher. The Attorneys General of NY, CT, and VT deserve tremendous thanks for this long overdue challenge to NRC's nuclear waste con game. A coalition of nearly 200 environmental groups has called since 2006 for "hardened on-site storage" as an interim safety and security measure to protest irradiated nuclear fuel from accidents and attacks. Calls have been ongoing for quality assurance upgrades on dry cask storage as well, to prevent radioactivity leaks over time from the concrete and/or steel silos that are located out in the open, exposed to the degrading impacts of the elements.