Hanford area business leaders to file lawsuit against Obama on Yucca Mountain

WASHINGTON -- Three business leaders from the area around the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state say they plan to file a lawsuit March 1 to stop the Obama administration from shutting down the Yucca Mountain Project.

Terminating the site would leave stranded millions of gallons of radioactive waste stored in underground tanks at Hanford, they said. The waste was to be converted to glass logs for disposal in the proposed nuclear waste repository, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"Based on the fast track of this action to cancel the Yucca Mountain Project, we felt that a lawsuit was necessary to avoid irreparable impact to our community," Bob Ferguson, one of the expected plaintiffs, said at a news conference in Richland, Wash.

The businessmen sent a letter last week to President Barack Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu to protest the administration's plan to withdraw the Department of Energy's repository construction application.

"As far as we know, they did not consult with our community, and therefore, we believe the impacts on our community and the environment have not been addressed," Ferguson said. "They have not given any scientific reasons for their decision to circumvent the law, and there are just too many unanswered questions."

The threatened lawsuit comes on the heels of a lawsuit filed Friday by officials representing Aiken County, S.C. It seeks to stop DOE from moving to withdraw the license application.

Bruce Breslow, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said attorneys are studying the South Carolina lawsuit to determine whether Nevada should get involved.

Breslow said it is possible, after decades of battling the Department of Energy, that Nevada could join forces with DOE to push through with the Yucca Mountain shutdown against legal challenges from elsewhere in the country.

"It is not going to be a simple matter of DOE withdrawing the license," Breslow said. "If this gets hung up in the federal courts, it could hold up the withdrawal for some time."

Breslow speculated that pro-repository interests such as the nuclear energy industry could try to stall the Yucca shutdown "as long as they can" and possibly until the fall elections. U.S. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, who is behind the Obama administration's policy on Yucca Mountain, is fighting for re-election.

Aiken County is home to the Savannah River nuclear complex, which stores spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive materials that had been scheduled to be buried at the Nevada site.

According to the South Carolina lawsuit and a draft of the one from Washington state, the Obama administration is violating the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in acting to shut down Yucca program. The federal law, passed in 1982 and updated in 1987, set up the process for development of a Nevada repository.

The Aiken County lawsuit was filed in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The one from Washington state indicates it will be filed in the same court.

Ferguson is a former DOE official who served as chief executive for the Washington Public Power Supply System in the early 1980s. He retired as head of a technical services company in 2007.

He was joined by William Lampson, president of Lampson International, a heavy-equipment company that services nuclear construction sites. The third person is Gary Peterson, a vice president of TRIDEC, the economic development arm for Benton and Franklin counties surrounding the Hanford reservation.