Georgia, South Carolina community leaders protest Yucca shutdown

WASHINGTON -- Three dozen leaders from South Carolina and Georgia communities surrounding the sprawling Savannah River industrial complex were on Capitol Hill today protesting the planned shutdown of the Yucca Mountain project.

Among other nuclear materials programs, the government-owned Savannah River site is home to about 36 million gallons of liquid high level waste from the Cold War-era production of nuclear weapons ingredients like tritium and plutonium-239.

Over time liquid waste site is being converted into 6,000-7,000 glass logs that would be suitable to be dumped into a Nevada underground repository -- except that site is no longer in the cards for the Obama administration.

So what now?

The decision to terminate the repository effectively turns the Savannah River site and other places around the country into permanent storage sites for the radioactive materials, said David Jameson, president of the Greater Aiken Chamber of Commerce in South Carolina.

"We view this as an intolerable situation and do not intend to accept it without protest," Jameson said. The state of South Carolina and Aiken County, S.C. are among the plaintiffs in lawsuits that seek to halt termination of the Yucca project.

The visitors were meeting with Georgia and South Carolina lawmakers to assess the chances of getting the policy reversed in the face of a resolute Energy Secretary Steven Chu and a resolute Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who has vowed Congress will zero out the program this year.

At the least, they said at a press conference, Yucca Mountain should be weighed by recently formed blue ribbon commission that will be devising a new nuclear waste management strategy. Chu has made clear to the commissioners that Yucca Mountain is off their table.

"Yucca Mountain is the only known means to dispose of high level waste, and it must not be discarded unless and until a better disposal option has been determined and verified," said Sue Parr, president of the Augusta Metro Chamber of Commerce in Georgia.

"Like it or not, Yucca Mountain is the "gold standard," Parr said. "Every option considered will be compared to Yucca Mountain.

"If Yucca Mountain is not considered in the panel's deliberations, its report will lack credibility," she said.

At the press event, anti-nuclear activists challenged the idea that Yucca Mountain was going to solve all the storage problems at Savannah River.

As designed, the Nevada repository would have room for only a portion of the canisters from the government site, they said, along with only some of the waste materials now stored at the Hanford site in Washington state. Most of Yucca Mountain was set aside for storage of nuclear waste from commercial power plants.

Rick McLeod, executive director of the Savannah River Site Community Reuse Organization, said the locals hope that as policymakers consider new strategies for waste storage, defense-generated nuclear waste would be given priority for storage in the Nevada mountainside.