How Congress controls DOE, etc.

[John Jacobus <crispy_bird@YAHOO.COM>]

This is from an article that someone sent to me.  It

shows that neither science nor risk shall take

precedence over what Congress wants to do.

-----------------------------------



SOURCE:  NY TIMES

October 1, 2003



Energy Dept. Seeks Power to Redefine Nuclear Waste



By MATTHEW L. WALD



WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - The Energy Department has asked

Congress to allow it to redefine some nuclear waste so

it can be left in place or sent to sites intended for

low-level radioactive material, rather than being

buried deep underground.



Department officials say they thought they had

flexibility in classifying what constituted high-level

nuclear waste, but in July, a federal district judge

in Idaho ruled that the department's plan for treating

waste there violated the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, a

1982 law requiring the deep burial of high-level

waste. 



The argument concerns tens of millions of gallons of

salts and sludges left over from weapons production

that are now in tanks in Idaho, South Carolina and

eastern Washington. High-level waste is supposed to be

encapsulated in glass for burial. The department has

chosen Yucca Mountain, Nev., as the repository site,

but the site has not yet opened and when it does, it

will not be big enough for all the solidified wastes

and spent reactor fuel. 



In the Idaho case, the Energy Department had said that

some of the high-level waste was "incidental" and need

not be removed from the tanks. The Natural Resources

Defense Council and the Snake River Alliance, a local

environmental group, along with two Indian tribes,

successfully argued that the order violated a longtime

policy that high-level waste must be deeply buried.



The ruling also could affect waste from a defunct

civilian reprocessing plant in West Valley, N.Y., near

Buffalo. The waste has already been solidified, and

department officials said Tuesday that the resulting

glass logs would be shipped for deep burial. But the

officials said that contaminated buildings and

equipment there might be left on site.



"This is D.O.E.'s attempt to pawn off highly

contaminated stuff on the state," Senator Charles E.

Schumer, Democrat of New York, said on Tuesday. "We

are fighting it."



Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, the

ranking minority member of the Senate Energy and

Natural Resources Committee, said that "if the D.O.E.

has the authority to change the classification of the

waste at will, that pretty much undercuts any

Congressional control of the issue." Mr. Bingaman said

that one result could be wastes being shipped to the

Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, near Carlsbad, N.M., that

did not belong there. 



A department official said, however, that it would not

change what was acceptable at the Carlsbad plant,

which is designed for plutonium and other long-lived

materials.



The Energy Department asked Congressional leaders in

August for the authority to decide what constituted

nuclear waste. A spokeswoman for the energy committee,

Marnie Funk, said on Tuesday that the committee's

Republican majority would not accept the Energy

Department language, but opponents said that was just

one of a series of proposals that the department would

make.



Spencer Abraham, the secretary of energy, said in

August in a letter to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert that

the Idaho case could mean decades of delay in removing

the waste from the tanks, and cleanup costs could be

10 to 100 times higher than the $39 billion now

estimated.



An Energy Department official said the ruling had left

the department paralyzed.



"The district court decision doesn't say which of the

stuff from reprocessing has to go to Yucca Mountain,"

the official said.



Tom Cochran, a nuclear expert at the Natural Resources

Defense Council, said, "Basically what they're doing

is allowing the D.O.E. to abandon high-level waste and

treat it under standards written for low-level waste."

-------------------------------



=====

"Self-criticism is the secret weapon of democracy, and candor and confession are good for the public soul."

Adlai Stevenson



-- John

John Jacobus, MS

Certified Health Physicist

e-mail:  crispy_bird@yahoo.com



__________________________________

Do you Yahoo!?

The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search

http://shopping.yahoo.com

************************************************************************

You are currently subscribed to the Radsafe mailing list. To unsubscribe,

send an e-mail to Majordomo@list.vanderbilt.edu  Put the text "unsubscribe

radsafe" (no quote marks) in the body of the e-mail, with no subject line.

You can view the Radsafe archives at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/radsafe/