Mar 27 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Rob Pavey The Augusta Chronicle, Ga.



The Energy Department's decision to abandon a planned nuclear waste repository in Nevada's Yucca Mountain will create long-term problems for Savannah River Site, a South Carolina official told a blue ribbon panel convened to explore alternatives.

"Yucca Mountain is the only known means to dispose of high-level waste, and it must not be discarded until a better disposal option has been verified," said Rick McLeod, the executive director of the SRS Community Reuse Organization, a regional economic development coalition.

Yucca Mountain, 90 miles from Las Vegas, was being designed to accommodate radioactive material now stored at 121 temporary sites in 39 states, including SRS, where high-level wastes are stored in steel cylinders that were to be shipped elsewhere.

Yucca Mountain also would have housed 70,000 tons of waste from the nation's 104 commercial reactors, which are generating about 2,000 additional tons of spent fuel each year.

 President Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu opted last year to cancel further work on the project.

A 15-member Blue Ribbon Panel created to explore alternatives held its first meeting this week in Washington, where McLeod and others delivered comments.

McLeod asked that the commission include the reinstatement of Yucca Mountain among the alternatives being explored.

"For those of us who live near DOE sites with defense high-level wastes, a geologic repository at Yucca Mountain has always been the only answer," he said. "There is not now, nor has there ever been, a Plan B."

The panel, led by former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, needs representation from the communities and states most affected by nuclear waste, McLeod said.

"We respectfully insist that affected communities have representation and input into the panel's deliberations," he said.

McLeod said reprocessing of nuclear waste should also be examined. Though it could reduce stockpiles of spent fuel, it would only reduce -- not eliminate -- the need for a long-term storage site for waste, he said.

Other comments submitted Friday included a request from South Carolina Public Service Commission Chairman David Wright, who also heads the 47-member Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition. He urged the panel to continue to review Yucca Mountain, where more than $10 billion has been spent in an effort to establish the repository.

The panel is scheduled to make its first series of recommendations in fall of 2011.

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