Court delays Yucca ruling
http://www.aikenstandard.com/story/080812-yucca-mountain-nuclear-
An appeals court is putting off deciding whether to force the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to act on the Yucca Mountain site’s long-pending license application.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit announced on Friday it will wait up to four months to rule on a petition ordering the NRC to approve or disapprove the application because the Commission reports it does not have sufficient funds to conduct a review.
The petition to the court - a writ of mandamus - seeking to compel NRC to act was filed last year by Aiken County.
Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh, in his concurring opinion, wrote, “The parties’ submissions reveal that granting mandamus now would entail significant expenditures of government resources. But Congress’s upcoming appropriations decisions would well affect whether those expenditures are necessary.”
The court gave the NRC until ?Dec. 14 to report back whether Congress has allocated the funding the Commission says it needs, more than the $10.4 million it already has.
Aiken County filed the writ of mandamus in response to the Department of Energy’s attempt to abandon the license application pending before NRC on the proposed repository for used nuclear waste. NRC received the application roughly three years ago, but has not yet ruled on it, even though the 1987 Nuclear Waste Policy Act says it is bound to determine if Yucca Mountain is suitable.
The parties that initiated the lawsuit have voiced concerns that, if the federal government abandons the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, the only congressionally approved site for permanently disposing of the nation’s spent nuclear waste will be lost.
Read more: Court delays Yucca ruling | Aiken Standard
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They are waiting until after the election.