Beyond Nuclear - Radioactive Waste What's New

On June 2, 2016, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) holds an evening live webcast of a public meeting in Boston, MA, the sixth such meeting this year in the United States, to test public sentiment for the “consent-based siting” of deep geological burial of high-level nuclear waste from the nation’s nuclear power stations. More immediately, the federal energy agency is looking for volunteers to be the indefinite and potentially permanent willing host to thousands of radioactive waste casks on fenced parking lots for the questionable future for licensing and building nuclear dumps and designate the hazardous transport routes from nuclear stations by road, rail and barge. DOE's current priority is to open "centralized interim storage" sites by 2021, which would launch Mobile Chernobyls onto the roads, rails, and waterways of most states, including into the Port of Boston itself.

The DOE was last in New England beginning in the Fall of 1985 and by contrast looking for the nuclear industry’s dump site by “eminent domain.” The granite formations of Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire came under the scrutiny of government and industry for the deep geological burial of at least 70,000 metric tons of dangerous irradiated fuel from nuclear generating stations. The DOE had already declared Texas, Nevada and Washington State as the candidate sites for the nation’s first nuclear waste repository. In January 1986, DOE officials announced the government singled out twelve sites for a second waste repository east of the Mississippi River including the crystalline rock bodies under Hillsborough, New Hampshire and several more neighboring Yankee towns for a 20,000 surface acre “national sacrifice area” and two more large granite sites in Maine.

That earlier DOE plan did not work out by popular demand. By March 1986, there were 130 of New Hampshire’s 224 towns petitioning warrant articles before the state’s centuries old local town hall meeting process to oppose the siting of a nuclear waste dump in the Granite State. Of those towns, 100 towns voted more “to oppose the burial, storage, transportation and production of high-level nuclear waste” in the State of New Hampshire. The broad majority of an informed, even conservative state citizenry made the ethical connection between not wanting to take and not wanting to make dangerous nuclear waste.

The DOE was similarly met by adamant and popular public opposition throughout New England as well as the rest of a nation that had just witnessed the technological disaster with the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion and soon the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in Ukraine and across Europe. By December 2007 Congress and the DOE suspended the search for a second repository and singled out Yucca Mountain with the “Screw Nevada Bill.”

Nearly a decade later, a $9 billion dry hole in a seismically active and defunded Yucca Mt., the DOE and Congress are on the hunt again to do the nuclear industry’s bidding. Your comments and opposition is needed to make that first and most responsible step in long-term management of nuclear waste---Stop Making It!

You can read our suggested talking points and file your comments to the DOE by July 31, 2016. We Do Not Consent!

Update on June 7, 2016 by

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Anti-Nuclear Activists Speak Out During Dept. of Energy Tour over Nuclear Waste

As featured on the headlines segment of Democracy Now!:

The Department of Energy is conducting an eight-city national tour aimed at gathering public feedback on the issue of where to store nuclear waste. The agency has launched a so-called consent-based siting model to determine where to store spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. At a hearing in Boston Thursday, Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear raised objections to the process.

Paul Gunter: "How does the public in the affected community build trust when the Department of Energy itself is a promotional agency doing the bidding of the nuclear industry by direct promotion, and that the whole process going forward to date has lacked consent? There’s never been consent with regard to generation of nuclear waste."