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Transport of radioactive waste to an interim storage facility near the German town of Gorleben from a reprocessing plant in La Hague in France has been cancelled for the coming year, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on Tuesday.

Reactions were mixed yesterday after the Ministry of Economic Affairs said on Tuesday evening that Taitung County's Daren Township and Penghu County's Wang-an Township were its two preferred locations for storing low-radiation nuclear waste. The ministry committee tasked with selecting potential sites eliminated Pingtung County's Mu-tan Township as an option. Regulations for selecting sites require that the decision be open for public comment for 30 days. If there is opposition from the communities, authorities could try to negotiate. The proposals must be put to local referendums, with more than half of eligible voters participating and more than half of the ballots cast in support of the sites for them to be built.

Yucca Mountain: it's nice to look at, but green it ain't. The thought of endless nuclear waste barely contained inside a seismically-active mountain is enough to give anyone the chills. That's why nuclear design engineer Dean Engelhardt started Permanent RadWaste Solutions, a company that proposes to send nuclear waste to the surface of Earth's inner core.

The West's environmental movement got buffeted by strong late-winter winds, both good and ill. First, President Barack Obama has targeted the federal government's 22-year-old multibillion-dollar effort to bury nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. He vowed to devise "a new strategy" on dealing with nuclear waste, while seeking little money for Yucca Mountain in his 2010 budget proposal, released in late February. Congress will probably go along with that, since the Senate majority leader, Nevada's Harry Reid, also opposes the project. The bad news within that good news: There is still no place for long-term storage of the 57,700 tons of nuclear waste that are being held in dozens of "temporary" storage sites around the country, plus the 2,000 additional tons that nuclear reactors will produce this year, and the additional tons that'll be produced in 2010, and so on. Back to Square One on solving that problem.

A remote island of offshore Penghu County and a sparsely populated rural township in eastern Taiwan were chosen yesterday as the final suggestions for a site for a permanent radioactive waste dump. According to a panel of experts under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the final site of the dump will be selected between Penghu's Wangan island and Taitung County's Daren township. The announcement of the two locations will be gazetted from Wednesday until April 16, with a referendum among residents of the two counties to be held in two months at the earliest to determine whether they will allow the dump to be built in their areas. Should they refuse to vote in favor of the dump, the site plans will be scrapped, according to the panel. The dump is needed to replace an existing dump on Orchid island in Taitung County, which will be shut down because of fierce opposition from local residents.

A mayor in Fukushima Prefecture is considering allowing his town to host a disposal site for highly radioactive waste, it has been learned. "There are 10 nuclear reactors in Fukushima Prefecture. I don't think we can just leave the problem of disposing of waste to other prefectures," Narahamachi Mayor Takashi Kusano said. However, on Monday, Fukushima Gov. Yuhei Sato said that the prefectural government was not considering accepting such a site. The central government has been accepting applications from local governments willing to host waste sites since 2002. In 2007, Toyocho, Kochi Prefecture, offered to host such a project but withdrew its application in 2007 following a campaign against the project. The government has not so far found any local government willing to accept a site.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a rule for allowable radiation levels at the proposed nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada for up to 1 million years, the NRC announced on Tuesday. The NRC is now accepting the radiation standards from Yucca Mountain as determined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The NRC kept the EPA's rule of limiting the dose of radiation to 15 millirem for the first 10,000 years after disposal. Now, the NRC has adopted the EPA's limit of 100 millirem from 10,001 years to 1 million years.

US Energy Secretary Steven Chu backed a new generation of nuclear power Wednesday, and said a panel of experts would report back this year on the best long-term storage of radioactive waste. The Nobel laureate scientist, chosen by President Barack Obama to lead an ambitious drive for renewable energy, said nuclear power was also an "essential part of our energy mix" along with cleaner coal and carbon capture. Chu said he was convening a "blue-ribbon panel" of experts to "develop a long-term strategy that must include the waste disposal plan," after Obama's budget ruled out a proposed national repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

The Obama administration may be drawing up plans to store nuclear waste at multiple sites around the country, instead of in a central depository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. As I noted last week, Obama's budget cuts money to the controversial Yucca Mountain site. Earlier this week, in a U.S. Senate hearing, energy secretary Steven Chu confirmed that the administration no longer considers the site an option. Concerns have been raised about the safety of the site, which apparently was chosen without much careful study. However, the government has an obligation to do something with the waste. The government has collected tens of billions of dollars to create a permanent facility to store waste, one that by law was supposed to be ready by 1998. Instead, utilities have had to pay to store the waste themselves. Now more details are coming out about what the Obama administration plans to do.

This Tuesday, about 30 people collected on the sidewalk in front of the local office of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Representing a diverse cross-section of area organizations, the group stood shoulder to shoulder to demonstrate their solidarity, to exhort citizens to comment, and to urge policymakers to decide now to fully clean up the West Valley Nuclear Waste Site. Speakers included: Todd Gates, Seneca Nation of Indians Tribal Councilor; Bill Nowak, representing New York State Senator Antoine Thompson; Bob Ciesielski, Sierra Club; Sister Sharon Goodremote, Buffalo Diocese Care for Creation Committee; Brian Smith, Citizens Campaign for the Environment; Diane D'Arrigo, Nuclear Information & Resource Service; and Lenore Lee Lambert, League of Women Voters Western New York's Citizens Task Force. The group brought mops, buckets, and brooms and called themselves the "Cleanup Crew."