Fight to Store Waste Under Mountain Persists

While the Department of Energy faces several lawsuits
to its proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site in Nevada,
tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste are stored at nuclear
plants. The GLRC’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

While the Department of Energy faces several lawsuits to its proposed Yucca Mountain
nuclear waste site in Nevada, tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste are stored at
nuclear plants. The GLRC’s Lester Graham reports:


A U.S. Court of Appeals recently sidelined a lawsuit challenging the Energy Department’s plans to transport high-level radioactive waste to Yucca Mountain, but at least seven other lawsuits are waiting in the wings.


The plan to store radioactive waste such as spent nuclear fuel rods from power plants
under Yucca Mountain has been in the works for two decades. The government had
planned to open Yucca Mountain in 2012. That schedule has
been pushed back five years to 2017. The government needs the time to get approvals
from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and to prepare environmental impact reports
that are expected to face further court challenges.


Nuclear power plants, which are often situated near rivers or lakes, are storing the
radioactive waste on site and some plants are running out of room and are to store the waste
in containers outside.


For the GLRC, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Canada to Restart Nuke Program?

The debate over nuclear energy in the Great Lakes Region will likely heat up again in the coming months. In Canada, three reactors are coming back online after they were closed for years, and as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk reports, a new nuclear power plant might be built:

Transcript

The debate over nuclear energy in the Great Lakes Region will likely heat up again in the coming
months. Ontario is about to bring three reactors back on line after they were closed for years.
And as Dan Karpenchuk reports, the province is also considering building a new nuclear power
plant:


Ontario is facing an energy crunch. Demand during the summer months, last year, had tested the
province’s reserves to the limit, and an especially cold winter has placed even more demands on
the system.


Now Ontario premier, Ernie Eves, says he’s considering new ways of dealing with the energy
shortage and nothing will be left out.


“That includes everything from wind power to large nuclear projects.”


Bruce Power owns two nuclear plants on the shores of Lake Huron. Recently its President,
Duncan Hawthorne, met with Ontario officials and made it clear his company wants to be
involved in any new nuclear projects.


“We’ve got a strong capable workforce, we’ve got every favorable community around us, we’ve
got a formula that we can build on.”


But environmental groups and opposition politicians were quick to denounce the plan, saying the
industry does not have a good record.


They say Ontario has some of the oldest reactors in North America. And history has shown that
every time a nuclear plant has been built in the province, the cost overruns have been enormous,
with taxpayers ending up with the bill.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Dan Karpenchuk.

Nuking Nuclear Waste

Finding a way to safely dispose of nuclear waste has been a problem that
has plagued the nuclear industry since the Cold War. But as the Great
Lakes Radio Consortium’s Suzanne Elston has discovered, a physicist from
Boise, Idaho has plans to give nuclear waste a taste of its own
medicine.

Patterns of Illness Around Nuke Plants

Unexplained illnesses have been found around many of the nation’snuclear research and weapons plants. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’sLester Graham reports: