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U.S. Appeals Court Hears Arguments in Yucca Mountain Project Dispute
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia yesterday heard oral arguments from the U.S. federal government and Nevada in their dispute over the U.S. Energy Department’s plan to construct a long-term nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, according to the Washington Post (see GSN, Jan. 14). A three-judge panel consolidated the cases of 13 lawsuits against the Yucca Mountain project, which Nevada strongly opposes, into three main categories considered yesterday. Opponents of the project have said that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency radiation standards are too weak, that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should demand that the natural characteristics of the site be able to contain the waste without the need for manmade barriers, and that the Energy Department used flawed criteria when selecting Yucca Mountain (Carol Leonnig, Washington Post, Jan. 15). During yesterday’s presentations, two of the three judges on the panel made comments that appeared to back Nevada’s criticism of safety regulations for the Yucca Mountain site, according to Energy Daily. For example, the judges questioned why groundwater protection standards were only set to last for 10,000 years, which is a far shorter time period than had been previously recommended by an expert panel that the government had been directed by Congress to follow, Energy Daily reported. The panel was less supportive, though, of Nevada’s argument that the government had violated the U.S. Constitution by selecting the state as the site of the repository to the exclusion of other possible sites in other states, Energy Daily reported (Jeff Beattie, Energy Daily, Jan. 15).
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