Washington (Platts)--11May2009

NRC licensing boards have admitted eight parties and 299 contentions in
the agency's licensing proceeding on a high-level nuclear waste repository
that DOE wants to build at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, NRC said May 11. The
agency's Atomic Safety and Licensing Boards, or ASLBs, said in a 153-page
order that the boards granted petitions to intervene to the states of Nevada
and California; the Nuclear Energy Institute; the Nevada counties of Nye,
Clark and White; Inyo County in California; and the Nevada counties of
Churchill, Esmeralda, Lander and Mineral, which filed jointly. The California
state line is less than 100 miles from Yucca Mountain, and the water table
below Yucca surfaces in California. The announcement came less than a week
after President Barack Obama's administration said in its budget request that
it would be moving the repository program to an "orderly shutdown" in fiscal
2010, which begins October 1. The budget proposal seeks a minimum amount of
funds for licensing activities next fiscal year, a move that some believe is
aimed at averting a total breach of the spent fuel disposal contracts that DOE
signed with nuclear utilities in 1983.