The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project is not dead? The Los Angeles Times reports that States and nuclear facilities that want to ship radioactive material to the nuclear waste repository have sued to resurrect the disposal plan that Nevada and the Obama administration pledged to end. On December 10, a federal appeals court in Washington issued a ruling that will allow a case to go forward disputing the Obama administration’s authority to kill the project. The case was filed by North Carolina and Washington State, which both have large amounts of waste, among other plaintiffs. 

In the last year of the George H.W. Bush administration, the Department of Energy filed an application for a license to operate Yucca Mountain. But the Obama administration pledged to kill the project by cutting funding and withdrawing the licence application, arguing that the waste canisters inside the mountains would corrode thousand of years prematurely and release radioactivity into the environment. The plan to withdraw the license is being disputed by a licensing board under the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and by the states in the court case.

Read this story at Latimes.com

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