Published: 2008
Total Pages: 0
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It has been argued that the government's difficulty promulgating a legally defensible public health and safety standard for the Yucca Mountain repository has far-reaching impacts on the nuclear industry and the viability of nuclear power as a long-term component of the United States' energy strategy. [...] Congress has held several hearings in the past few years focusing on the administration's progress toward finalizing the health and safety standard, the technical soundness of the Department of Energy's (DOE's) design for the facility, the relationship of the project to broader energy policy, and transportation safety issues for waste packages eventually sent to the facility, among other issues. [...] The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) role is to establish the public health and safety standards for high-level waste disposal; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licenses and regulates the repository, using EPA's standards as the compliance measure; the Department of Energy (DOE) constructs and operates the repository. [...] On the issue of the 10,000-year compliance standard, the Court upheld the challenge and vacated the 2001 standard, ruling that the 10,000-year compliance time frame was not "based upon and consistent with" the NAS finding that "there is no scientific basis for limiting the time period to 10,000 years or any other value. [...] The proposal retained the dose limits of the 2001 standard for the first 10,000 years but proposed a higher annual dose of 350 mrem/yr for the period of 10,000 years through 1 million years.