Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
8/29/2014
Nevada’s Interim Finance Committee approved this week a $1.4 million funding request from the state’s Attorney General Office and Agency for Nuclear Projects for their efforts to combat Yucca Mountain. With the Nuclear Regulatory Commission moving forward with the completion of the Yucca Safety Evaluation Reports, the state expects the Commission to begin releasing the completed volumes in the coming months. The funds will enable the two agencies to prepare a defense in order to prevent the project from moving forward. “The IFC obviously understands that at this critical time, Nevada cannot relent in its efforts to block the ill-conceived and dangerous Yucca Mountain Project,” Nevada Assistant Attorney General Marta Adams said this week. “These funds, to be administered jointly by the Nevada Attorney General’s office and the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, enable the State to continue to advance its public health and safety case documenting the unsuitability of the Yucca Mountain site.”
Adams recently told RW Monitor that the state is operating under the assumption that the SERs would be released in the fall, and that the supplemental Environmental Impact Statement would follow sometime in early winter. Nevada is basing those release dates off the monthly SER update reports sent to Congress from NRC Chair Allison Macfarlane, Adams said. The release of those documents would need intense dissection by technical and legal experts, which the funds are earmarked for. “Of the joint funding request we are making, more than 80 percent of the funds requested are for the purpose of dissecting and challenging the NRC staff opinions presented in the SER,” Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects Director Bob Halstead said. “The publication of the SER later this fall will not be the conclusion of the safety debate, as many pro-Yucca advocates have said, and will undoubtedly say again. The publication of the SER is in fact and in law only the beginning of a long and complicated safety debate. It sets the stage for new safety challenges, months of discovery depositions, years of trial-like hearings with cross-examination of witnesses, and subsequent litigation.”
Nevada has been a long-time opponent to the Yucca Mountain repository, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) led the charge to kill the project in 2010. A U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C Circuit decision last year, though, compelled the NRC to restart the licensing review and use its existing Nuclear Waste Fund appropriations. The review had originally been canceled when the Department of Energy deemed the site “unworkable” back in 2010. The court’s decision resulted in the Commission issuing an order in November setting forth a pathway to re-start the Yucca Mountain licensing review, including the completion of the SERs and a request for a supplemental EIS from DOE on groundwater issues to satisfy requirements set forth in the National Environmental Policy Act. DOE had initially planned to move forward with the NRC’s request for the study, but in February, DOE argued that since it submitted a groundwater EIS in 2008, it did not have to update the EIS to fulfill its Nuclear Waste Policy Act legal obligations. The NRC plans to complete the EIS in DOE’s stead.
