Beyond Nuclear slams court decision favoring NRC on nuclear waste

"STOP THE NUKE WASTE CON JOB" banner, unfurled at the NRC Commissioners Hearing Room at the agency's HQ in Rockville, Maryland, at one of countless "Nuke Waste Con Game" public comment sessions at which environmental watchdogs demanded industry and government "STOP MAKING IT!" Photo by Kevin Kamps, Beyond Nuclear.Beyond Nuclear has responded to last week's ruling, by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, against a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) Nuclear Waste Confidence policy, renamed Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel. The suit was brought by a nationwide coalition of environmental groups, states (CT, MA, NY, VT), and the Prairie Island Indian Community of MN. The court endorsed NRC's woefully inadequate risk analysis of high-level radioactive waste storage pool fires and leaks, as well as NRC's false confidence that institutional control of irradiated nuclear fuel surface storage will be assured over time, and a geologic repository opened someday. The ruling flies in the face of very recent reports by the National Academy of Sciences, and Princeton researchers that a U.S. pool fire could unleash a radioactive catastrophe dwarfing Fukushima, and that such a fire was very narrowly averted at Fukushima itself, by sheer luck. The ruling comes amidst ongoing dissent against the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) latest attempt to ram through "consent-based" parking lot dumps and Mobile Chernobyls; public comments expressing non-consent are urgently needed! More