Feds Settle Suit Over Nuclear Waste Cleanup

The United States has settled a lawsuit brought by New York State over the allocation of costs for cleaning up an abandoned nuclear waste processing facility near Buffalo.

In a consent decree filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York, the federal government agreed to pay 90 percent, and New York State will pay 10 percent of the cleanup costs at the main processing plant.

However, each will pay 50 percent of the remedial costs for a landfill on the site.

"In the agreement issued today, specific allocations vary by the facility, with the federal government continuing to pay 90 percent of the costs for many of the cleanup activities," New York Gov. David Paterson said in a statement.

"Both the state and federal governments have, however, agreed to different percentages of the cleanup costs for some important facilities, such as the site disposal areas and the radioactive groundwater plume," Paterson added.

New York sued the federal government and the Department of Energy in 2006, alleging the agency was violating a 1980 law, the West Valley Demonstration Project Act that required it to dispose of the spent nuclear fuel at the Western New York Nuclear Service Center.

Under the law, the federal government contributes 90 percent of the cleanup costs, and New York contributes 10 percent.

The Nuclear Service Center began in the 1960s as the first privately owned, commercial, nuclear fuel reprocessing facility. It processed about 640 metric tons of spent fuel, most of which came from federal nuclear waste plants, according to the complaint.

The federal government then got the plutonium and uranium recovered through the spent fuel reprocessing, the complaint said.

The Nuclear Service Center was abandoned in 1972, according to the suit, leaving behind several disposal landfills, contaminated buildings and 600,000 gallons of high-level, radioactive waste stored in underground tanks.

New York said much of this waste will remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years.

The Department of Energy has solidified most of the liquid radioactive waste in the underground tanks into glass logs, the complaint said. However, the cleanup project requires this waste to be transported to a federal repository for permanent disposal, the state said.

The federal government planned for Yucca Mountain, located 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, to be the nation's sole depository for spent nuclear fuel.

That facility was supposed to be in operation by 2017, but it appears that the project is dead because of public and political opposition.

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