Yucca Mountain

We, the undersigned, petition the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to reject the Department of Energy’s (DOE) license application to construct the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump.

The DOE is proposing to dump 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste in Nevada after transporting it through counties home to over 106 million people.

Enduring these nuclear waste shipments will be communities from Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Florida, Arizona, Delaware, West Virginia, Wisconsin, South Dakota and Nevada.

That’s 45 states which could host nuclear waste routes.  Yet there will be absolutely no public process to review these routes – not by the NRC, not by the DOE, and not even by the U.S. Department of Transportation.  This is a massive and dangerous shipping campaign, but the NRC refuses to scrutinize it when considering DOE’s application to build the dump.

Furthermore, DOE does not even have complete plans to transport nuclear waste or to build the dump at Yucca Mountain, which is in an earthquake-prone environment.  In fact, DOE readily admits that designs for the repository will be at most 35% complete when it asks NRC to license it.

Even worse, the Environmental Protection Agency has not decided what levels of radiation can be “safely leaked” from the dump.  EPA has proposed a dangerously lenient radiation standard that completely disregards the health and safety of future generations.  But, with less than half the designs for the dump complete, it is preposterous to think that NRC is in a position to decide that a nuclear waste dump could meet EPA’s terrible proposed radiation standard.

THE NRC SHOULD NOT DOCKET DOE’S LICENSE APPLICATION TO BUILD A NUCLEAR WASTE DUMP AT YUCCA MOUNTAIN.