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Lawmaker urges halt in payments to nuclear waste fund While the legislature debates tax increases, one Minnesota congressman wants to give back money most of you have been paying in a hidden fee. You can't find it on your Xcel Energy electricity bill, but you've been paying it for decades--all for something that hasn't even been used. Plans introduced in Congress and here in Minnesota would scrap the fee and give you the refund.

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.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee narrowly defeated a GOP amendment yesterday that would have provided government support for two nuclear waste reprocessing facilities and $1 million for places willing to site a temporary storage area for used fuel.

The Nevada Commission on Ethics Thursday cleared former Nuclear Projects Director Bob Loux of charges he broke the rules by raising his own pay. They did so on a 3-2 vote with the majority pointing out that the charges levied against him were wrong because they said he raised his own pay "above the legislatively approved" amount. Commissioners George Keele, Don Classic and James Shaw all agreed the legislature doesn't approve specific salaries for non-classified state employees in the governor's office. "It should have said, did he give himself a pay raise above the governor's approved salary," said Klassic.

Nevadans are growing less interested in importing California's garbage, and a dry lake bed outside this desert town has become a test case. A landfill outside Reno already imports about 275,000 tons of California waste each year. Two other dumps in central and southern Nevada got permits to do so years ago, with little protest. But new plans to bury as much as 4,000 tons a day of San Francisco Bay Area trash at the proposed Jungo Road dump near Winnemucca have sparked strong opposition.

Nevadans are growing less interested in importing California's garbage, and a dry lake bed outside this desert town has become a test case. A landfill outside Reno already imports about 275,000 tons of California waste each year. Two other dumps in central and southern Nevada got permits to do so years ago, with little protest. But new plans to bury as much as 4,000 tons a day of San Francisco Bay Area trash at the proposed Jungo Road dump near Winnemucca have sparked strong opposition.