Study: Send West valley nuke waste elsewhere
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- December
- 2
The state and federal government should scrap plans to store nuclear waste on the site of a closed fuel-reprocessing plant in West Valley, Cattaraugus County, and instead dig it up and ship it elsewhere, according to a report released today.
Although digging up tons of waste and shipping it away would cost almost $10 billion and take more than 60 years, it is still better than leaving the waste in the ground, where it is likely eventually to leak into Lake Erie, according to the report.
The study by Synapse Energy Economics of Massachusetts, funded with $90,000 in taxpayer money from Sen. Catharine Young, R-Olean, is at odds with a recent report from the federal Energy Department, which concluded it’s better and cheaper to leave the waste where it is.
The Energy Department will decide what to do within six months.
The state has already spent $250 million trying to clean up the site, which housed a company that reprocessed nuclear fuel for six years before closing in 1972.
A hangup has been that there is as of yet no federal repository to send the fuel to. Much of the waste will remain radioactive and dangerous for thousands of years.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 2:03 pm by Jay Gallagher.
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