For decades, communities within the fallout zones of nuclear power plants have been promised that a permanent waste facility will “soon” be available to store the nation’s 77,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste. The NRC is relying on the Waste Confidence Decision which basically stated that the NRC is confident that spent fuel can be safety stored onsite until a repository is opened to receive it. When this Decision was first released, the NRC thought a repository would be running by 1998 (foolish them, trusting the DOE) and stated that they expected the spent fuel to remain onsite no later than 30 years after cessation of reactor operation.

The Nuclear Regulator Commission public relations spokesperson, Victor Dricks, recently wrote a Tribune Viewpoint in which he described his understanding of a bill recently introduced by Senator Harry Reid’s to take the nation's only proposed permanent radioactive waste site off the table. Dricks stated “In fact, the legislation introduced by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., calls for storage of nuclear waste at the reactor sites where it is produced to buy time to develop alternatives to a proposed permanent waste facility beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada.” Senator Reid’s bill was introduced after the federal government spent billions of tax-payer dollars on the Nevada “hole”. Now the United States is back where it was before they approved Yucca Mtn as the nation’s nuclear waste repository.

Dricks appears not to be concerned by this prospect of leaving high-level radioactive waste on our coast until the federal government finds a solution – no matter how long it takes. In fact, no matter how may SLO residents asked when waste would be removed, the NRC side-stepped both the questions and the basis for Senator Reid’s introduced legislation – that Yucca Mtn will never open. Mr. Dricks seems quite comfortable with Congress, the NRC and the nuclear industry again raising the possibility of “reprocessing, transmutation and other technologies” to address solutions for this lethal material.

President Carter, a nuclear engineer, outlawed reprocessing in the United States as it increases the risks of nuclear proliferation. On the other hand President Bush appears to believe that virtually all countries should be allowed to build nuclear plants, the byproduct of which is growing stockpiles of high-level radioactive waste – waste that can becomes nuclear bomb grade material.

If Congress, the administration, the NRC, and the nuclear industry are indeed turning to reprocessing of high-level radioactive waste as a solution to radioactive waste production, there are many questions our community should be asking. How often will radioactive waste be shipped to a reprocessing facility and then back to Diablo Canyon? How will this lethal material be transported? Will Congress, the NRC and the nuclear industry consider building reprocessing plants in California? If not, where will these plants be sited?

Dricks states "…there is a lot of unhappiness with the concept [of dry cask storage]…” True enough. San Luis Obispo residents know nuclear waste is safer in dry casks than in the overcrowded pools, but the cask system should be more secure. However, we are willing to "temporarily" store the high-level radioactive waste produced at Diablo Canyon – we have no choice, but the NRC offers no definition of the word “temporary”.

When asked over and over when this waste will leave our county, the NRC has been unable to respond. This is the cause of our “unhappiness.” Both Mr. Dricks' viewpoint and the NRC's most recent visit to San Luis Obispo resulted in more unanswered questions than answers. That has been status quo for the NRC.

For this reason, the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility is working to create legislation that will prohibit license renewal applications from California’s nuclear utilities until there exists a permanent and proven safe solution to the daily production of high-level radioactive waste. This would allow the state to responsibly plan to replace this aging energy source by the mid-2020’s. This also would allow the state to decide how much high-level radioactive waste California is willing to store and for how long.

We invite our community to join us in this responsible solution to growing stockpiles of high-level radioactive waste on our fragile coastline.

http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispotribune/news/editorial/letters/13590040.htm