NRDC's logoNatural Resources Defense Council, Inc., (NRDC) has submitted its Response to DOE’s Invitation for Public Comment To Inform the Design of a Consent-Based Siting Process for Nuclear Waste Storage and Disposal Facilities to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
One of the authors of NRDC's Response, Geoffrey H. Fettus, NRDC Senior Attorney, served as legal counsel for an environmental coalition (including NRDC, Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Public Citizen, and others) from 2002 to 2004 that won a major legal victory against the proposed Yucca Mountain, Nevada high-level radioactive waste dump. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in Nuclear Energy Institute v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, ruled in favor of the environmental coalition, and State of Nevada, and ordered EPA back to the drawing boards on its Yucca dump safety, health, and environmental protection regulations. The agency had tried to cut off regulations at 10,000 years, long before the hazard of the radioactivity waste would dissipate.
Four long years later, in 2008, EPA had finalized its court-ordered rewrite of the regulations. The agency acknowledged that high-level radioactive waste would remain hazardous for a million years, 100 times longer than EPA had first admitted. (Even this is an underestimate: Iodine-129, for example, present in irradiated nuclear fuel, has a half-life of 15.7 million years; its hazardous persistence, then, is 157 to 314 million years!)
The legal victory played a huge role in blocking the momentum of the Yucca Moutain dump during the George W. Bush administration. The Obama administration later cancelled the dump project as "unworkable," and U.S. Senator Harry Reid, Democratic Senate Leader from Nevada, successfully blocked any further funding for the highly controversial and scientifically unsuitable dump scheme.
Most recently, Fettus, on behalf of NRDC, worked with an environmental coalition (including Beyond Nuclear), and its legal counsel (Diane Curran and Mindy Goldstein), to challenge the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) Nuclear Waste Confidence policy.
(After an adverse ruling by a three-judge panel on June 3, 2016, the environmental coalition on July 18th appealed its case to the full (en banc) U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.)