Nevada Wednesday asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reject the Department of Energy application to license Yucca Mountain, calling for an end to the 25-year-old effort to put the radioactive dump in southern Nevada.
Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto said the application commits numerous violations of the requirements starting with the fact DoE doesn't even have a valid radiation safety standard.
"The license application cannot be reviewed or docketed without an EPA radiation standard, the fundamental public health and safety benchmark," she said.
And the license application, filed Tuesday, she said was legally required to be filed by September 2002.
Bob Loux, who has headed Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects since the inception of the Yucca Mountain battle in the 1980s, said even some of the nuclear power companies have softened on their support for burying thousands of tons of high level waste in Yucca Mountain. He said once buried, it would be almost impossible to retrieve the waste.