Group items tagged

Local officials and citizens from Goliad County got some encouragement Wednesday in their fight against uranium mining over a south Texas aquifer. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality voted to allow a contested case hearing on an application by Uranium Energy Corporation to mine uranium just north of the historic mission town of Goliad. No uranium mining has occurred before in this agricultural area. "This has been such a long, long haul and it's not over yet," said local landowner Lu Ann Duderstadt, who lives near the area targeted for uranium mining. "I feel like we have a chance here and we're still going to carry this out until the end."

Maryland regulators gave UniStar Nuclear energy approval to build a US-EPR at the Calvert Cliffs site, according to Constellation Energy. UniStar is a joint venture of Constellation and Electricite de France. The Maryland Public Service Commission issued UniStar a certificate of public convenience and necessity June 29 after completing an 18-month review that included multiple public hearings, Constellation said. The certificate is required before Calvert Cliff-3 can be built.

"On Tuesday the Utah Division of Water Rights will hold public hearings on applications by both the Kane County and the San Juan County water conservancy districts to change the diversion points of 53,600 acre-feet of water from the Colorado and San Juan rivers upstream to the Green River. The applications also seek to change the designated use of the water to facilitate operation of a nuclear reactor along the Green River proposed by Blue Castle Holdings, Inc. The nuclear facility and its water consumption would deplete and alter Green River flows already threatened by climate disruption-flows that the survival and recovery of four endangered fish species depend (Colorado pikeminnow, razorback sucker, bonytail and humpback chub). The reactor further threatens to kill endangered fish caught in water intake structures and to exacerbate regional water contamination by associated uranium mining that is already contributing to the fish's decline in the upper Colorado River basin. Other imperiled species will also potentially be harmed, including the roundtail chub, bluehead sucker and flannelmouth sucker, all of which are subject to conservation agreements between the state and federal governments in order to preclude the need to list them under the Endangered Species Act. "Imposing this massive water withdrawal atop climate change and regional drying would force unacceptable risks on to endangered fish and the Colorado River system," said Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity, "It's time for the era of pollution- and water-intensive energy development to end. Those old technologies need to be replaced with clean renewables and energy conservation.""

"In a major victory for environmental advocates, New York State has ruled that outmoded cooling technology at the Indian Point nuclear power plant kills so many Hudson River fish, and consumes and contaminates so much water, that it violates the federal Clean Water Act. The decision is a blow to the plant's owner, the Entergy Corporation, which now faces the prospect of having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build stadium-size cooling towers, or risk that Indian Point's two operating reactors - which supply 30 percent of the electricity used by New York City and Westchester County - could be forced to shut down. Entergy officials said that they were "disappointed" in the ruling and that they might fight it in court. The original federal licenses for the two 1970s-era reactors expire in 2013 and 2015, and a water quality certificate is a prerequisite for a 20-year renewal by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But a prolonged appeal in New York could delay a shutdown, Diane Screnci, a spokeswoman for the commission, said late Saturday. An Entergy spokesman said that converting Indian Point's cooling system would cost $1.1 billion and would require shutting both reactors down entirely for 42 weeks. "