House NDAA Blocks DOE From Reclassifying High-Level Waste in Wash. State

As reported by the ExchangeMonitor.

NDAA is short for National Defense Authorization Act.

The high-level radioactive waste that the U.S. Department of Energy would like to now call "low-level" is an inevitable byproduct from reprocessing irradiated nuclear fuel. DOE's hopes to save money by not cleaning up high-level radioactive waste, as at Hanford Nuclear Reservation, and disposing of it in a permanent geologic repository, as is legally required under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as Amended.

To abandon high-level radioactive waste in situ, as along the banks of the Columbia River, risks catastrophic releases of hazardous radioactivity into the environment over long enough periods of time.