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"The Department of Energy has been given the green light to move full speed ahead with its shutdown plans for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste program. A federal appeals court late Monday dismissed a request to freeze termination activities until later this year, after judges have weighed lawsuits challenging the shutdown. The order clears the way for the DOE to resume dismantling the Nevada waste repository program that the Obama administration wants to shelve. Remaining federal employees were given pre-layoff notices earlier this year, and the DOE was scheduled to issue a termination letter to the project's management contractor. "We welcome the court's decision," DOE spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller said. "It means the court agreed that the department can proceed with winding down the Yucca project responsibly while the litigation proceeds so as not to needlessly waste taxpayer money." Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the repository's leading opponent, said the DOE "will resume shutting down the Yucca Mountain Project almost immediately.""

"The Nuclear Waste Policy Act and Amendments of 1982 and 1987 established a national policy and schedule for developing geologic repositories for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive wastes. Those deadlines have come and gone; the cancellation of Yucca Mountain was only the latest failure of this policy to become reality. The task of finding a new storage location is now a political committee's homework assignment. History tells us that committee members have been given an impossible task."

"The Department of Labor (DOL) Site Exposure Matrices (SEM) Website is a repository of information gathered from a variety of sources regarding toxic substances present at Department of Energy (DOE) and Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) facilities covered under Part E of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA). In putting together SEM, DOL held round table meetings with workers from DOE facilities all over the country and gathered their input on the hazards at these sites. DOL also obtained copies of thousands of documents from DOE regarding toxic substances at those facilities. In addition to toxic substance information, the SEM Website also contains information regarding scientifically established links between toxic substances and illnesses. Displayed links for diagnosed illnesses show how these correlate to toxic substance exposures. The relationship between toxic substances and diagnosed illnesses shown in SEM is derived from records of research by recognized medical authorities maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). DOL continually updates these relationships as new disease associations are recognized by NLM. The causal links provided by NLM do not represent an exclusive list of the pathways necessary for an affirmative Part E causation determination. Every case is evaluated on its own evidentiary merits. (Please note, however that SEM does not address the relationship between radiation and cancer. For purposes of EEOICPA, the relationship between radiation and cancer is evaluated by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH))."

"While officials in Washington continue to pass the political hot potato of nuclear waste production and disposal, the Palmetto State has been left holding the bag. The issues on the ground surrounding the nuclear industry in South Carolina are as perplexing as the national policies at the heart of the debate. On one hand, the Savannah River Site and the two new slated nuclear reactors in Jenkinsville and Cherokee County provide jobs and utilities; on the other hand we face the necessary evil of nuclear waste production and storage, a prospect made grimmer after the federal government recently backpedaled on plans to open the Yucca Mountain Repository in Nevada. The good news: the four new nuclear reactors slated to be built in our state will be constructed using a state of the art, efficient design, but the bad news: a recent (still disputed) study found a potential flaw in the design that could spew radioactive particles to the four winds. Good news: the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) has rescinded an order to triple waste canister density at SRS, but the bad news: the waste that was supposed to be temporary is still there indefinitely… sort of a black mushroom cloud with a silver lining."

"Two S.C. congressmen insert directives into House defense bill WASHINGTON -- The House passed a defense bill on Friday that calls for studies on what it would take to restart the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository and what the impact would be if the project is closed for good. The studies were inserted into a 600-page bill report by two congressmen from South Carolina who have been protesting the Obama administration's decision to terminate the Yucca project. Most Popular Stories 1. Paris Hilton says she likes single life 2. Motorcyclist dies, passenger injured in North Las Vegas accident 3. 20-year-old motorcyclist killed in collision near Lamb and Owens 4. GOP Senate hopeful Christensen curries favor in Mormon church 5. Tourists draw ACE while locals go bused 6. Embattled governor has piloted state during its deepest recession 7. Case backlog postponing deportations 8. Drone crew from Creech Air Force Base blamed for Afghan civilian deaths 9. Predator drone crew criticized 10. Nurse shares life-or-death moments There was little discussion of the issue during the two days the House debated its annual defense authorization bill. While the administration's moves to shut down the project have been criticized in Congress, it still might be too soon to tell whether efforts to revive the program are isolated to a few dozen angry lawmakers or whether a broader uprising is brewing. Aides to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the Senate majority leader and the chief shot blocker against Yucca Mountain bills, said the studies will be dropped when the defense bill is debated in the Senate."

"The US' search for a new spent fuel storage or disposal facility must be transparent, and state and local governments should be part of any early siting discussions, speakers told President Barack Obama's blue ribbon commission on nuclear waste Tuesday. The common threads of openness, and community and state engagement, were woven through many of the presentations the commission heard as it starts to evaluate how the US should proceed with a new strategy for managing utilities' spent fuel and the US Department of Energy's highly radioactive nuclear defense waste. The Obama administration established the commission to evaluate alternatives to the proposed nuclear waste repository project at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, roughly 95 miles outside Las Vegas. "

The Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency should be restructured. It should look for nuclear technology opportunities using Yucca Mountain for Nevada rather than be against Yucca. Nevada could benefit greatly from nuclear technology by allowing nuclear power plants using "reprocessing."

Nuclear power generates approximately 20 percent of all U.S. electricity. And because it is a low-carbon source of around-the-clock power, it has received renewed interest as concern grows over the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on our climate.

Nuclear power doesn't usually make for an applause line in a stump speech, but it has come up on the campaign trail. Both Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain see it as a way to combat climate change, though they've sometimes chosen their words with care.

Germany's vaunted salt mine solution for low-level nuclear waste has proven to be full of holes. Rock salt, at least while it's underground, has two main properties: It can be soft and easy to mine, and it can form a watertight seal. This helps explain why the West German government started forklifting thousands of metal drums of "low-to-medium" radioactive waste into an abandoned salt mine called Asse II during the 1960s. Asse II is named after its mountain range in the state of Lower Saxony. The mine plunges deep into the hills near Braunschweig (aka Brunswick), in the center of Germany, and politicians in Bonn regarded it during the Cold War as a test site for storage of nuclear waste. An overhead layer of rock salt would shield the mine from groundwater, and the shifting salt itself, over centuries, would seal up any fractures and finally pack the nuclear waste in a safe geological bed.

One of the world's first permanent nuclear waste storage sites that can house highly radioactive waste for more than 100,000 years will be built in Sweden, project officials said on Wednesday. The waste will be buried in tunnels drilled 500 metres (1,640 feet) underground in the bedrock in Forsmark, near the town of Oesthammar 200 kilometres (125 miles) north of Stockholm, the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB) said. Construction on the cutting-edge site could begin in 2016 and the site could be inaugurated in 2022 or 2024, according to SKB.

Japan's Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, built to extract plutonium from the spent fuel produced in Japan's nuclear reactors, continues to be plagued by technical difficulties that have pushed its start-up date for commercial operations to August this year. The plant in Rokkasho in northern Japan was out of action for six months from the end of 2008 due to problems in one of its vitrification facilities, a furnace that mixes high active liquid waste with molten glass to seal radioactive waste in steel canisters that can safely be buried in the ground. Attempts to restart the plant failed last November as problems with the glass melting process persisted. Then in January, 150 liters of high-level liquid radioactive waste leaked from pipes in the vitrification cell, forcing Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. to postpone operations until August. The problems at Rokkasho, especially with extracting plutonium from spent nuclear fuel, are a blow to Japan's nuclear fuel-cycle program, whose goal is to reprocess and re-use recoverable resources from spent nuclear fuel to produce fuel for its power plants. In fact the commitment to a domestic program to increase energy and reduce nuclear waste by reprocessing spent fuel led to the creation of Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd.

Regardless of whether Canada's nuclear waste gets sent to New Brunswick for long-term storage, the radioactive material would never-the-less be transported through the province by way of truck, train or boat to such a facility, says the group responsible for finding a storage site. The Nuclear Waste Management Organization says the issue of transporting used nuclear fuel from reactors across the country to one main underground storage facility is a major part of their site selection process, and they want to hear from the public about their methods and procedure. The organization held a public information meeting yesterday in Fredericton, the first in a series of provincial meetings about the process of selecting a site. Similar public meetings will take place today in Edmundston and Saint John, with another scheduled June 18 in Bathurst.

"The politically-independent Nuclear Waste Council is not convinced of the safety of a planned storage scheme for Sweden's nuclear waste. TT reports that the committee questions the durability of the copper capsules set to hold the waste and the quality of the bentonite mud that is to surround the containers. The debate about what to do with Sweden's nuclear waste has especially divided residents of Östhammar, the place where the waste would be stored under the scheme. The leftover nuclear products would be kept in copper barrels surrounded by a layer of protective bentonite mud, all of it buried 500 meters inside a rock mountain. SKB, the Swedish company with plans to build the storage center, has told the Council that the waste would be safely stowed for 100,000 years."

"It is, in the words of the Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen, "a place we must remember to forget." On a wooded island more than a hundred miles northwest of Helsinki, in the town of Eurajoki, Finnish engineers are digging a tunnel. When it is done 10 years from now, it will corkscrew three miles in and 1,600 feet down into crystalline gneiss bedrock that has been the foundation of Finland for 1.8 billion years. And there, in a darkness that is still being created, the used fuel rods from Finland's nuclear reactors - full of radioactive elements from the periodic table as dreamed up by Lord Voldemort, spitting neutrons and gamma rays - are to be sealed away forever, or at least 100,000 years. "

"An association based in Switzerland is helping its European neighbours in their search for a good place to dump nuclear waste. Ten nations have enlisted the aid of Baden-based Arius, or Association for Regional and International Underground Storage. They hope to consolidate their radioactive waste within a single location. The countries in question include Austria, Ireland, Italy and seven others - but not Switzerland. In 2006, the federal government enacted a ten-year moratorium on the export of nuclear waste - the storage of which is the producers' responsibility."