Bush Administration Attempts to Weaken Health & Safety Laws for Yucca Mtn.

http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=2176

The “Nuclear Fuel Management and Disposal Act” (S. 2589) was introduced in the Senate last week by Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and would eliminate health and safety laws and regulations for licensing and operating the site. It would also give the DOE unfettered access to utilities’ ratepayer fees while removing limits on the amount of nuclear waste to be buried at the dump.

The bill’s most egregious provisions would:

Abolish state, local and tribal government transportation authority over the shipment of nuclear waste by rail, highway and barge from around the country to the dump site, and give all authority to the DOE, in contradiction to a recent National Academy of Sciences report that advocated a central role for state and tribal governments;

Exempt the Yucca site, as well as potentially all DOE sites, from the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, thereby allowing hundreds of millions of pounds of hazardous heavy metals from waste containers to contaminate groundwater used for drinking and irrigation;

Waive state and local air quality laws for the site;

Remove limits on the amount of nuclear waste that can legally be stored at the Yucca dump, which is currently set at 70,000 metric tons;

Reclassify the Nuclear Waste Fund, which is collected from electricity ratepayers for nuclear waste disposal, to ensure a dedicated source of funding for the project despite a long history of waste, fraud and mismanagement by the DOE and its contractors;

Codify the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) “waste confidence rule” into law, stating that there will be a dump for spent fuel “in a timely manner,” thereby politicizing what should be a scientific and technical determination and enabling the building of new plants; and,
Allow the DOE to change the site design even after the NRC issues a construction license according to a specific design.

Except nuke it outright.

Let them. They, unlike us, are more likely to survive...

But why they couldn't wait until after the end to do this is beyond me...

Hey Pete, I've got a thought. Once y'all have reclassified those pesky little regs, no point in spending all that money on containers and salt-lined caverns to store the waste in, when you could probably pick up warehouses in America's deserted downtown areas for next to nothing. You wouldn't even have to replace the broken windows or fix the toilets. What do you think? And the tax payers get to pick up the bill for poisoning themselves. What a plan, hefe!
:sarcasm: