YAKIMA – An appellate court has overturned a lower court’s ruling barring the U.S. Department of Energy from reclassifying high-level waste at a nuclear site in Washington state, saying it was too soon to consider opponents’ claims.
A federal judge in Idaho last year barred the Energy Department from reclassifying the waste after the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Snake River Alliance, the Yakama Nation and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes filed suit.
The Energy Department maintains that some highly radioactive residue in the waste tanks is too expensive to extract. The department has proposed reclassifying it as less dangerous, combining it with concrete grout and leaving it where it is.
U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill of Boise ruled the Energy Department’s plans conflicted with provisions of the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act.
The appellate court said Friday it was too soon to say if those plans violated the act. All parties must adopt a wait-and-see attitude rather than make assumptions about the Energy Department’s intentions and ability to dispose of waste, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said.
“There might be some danger in waiting, but that is not a greater hardship for NRDC and the rest of our society than the one already imposed by our high-level-waste Frankenstein,” the court said.
The court sent the case back to the lower court with directions to dismiss.
“The good news, from our perspective, is that the court did not rule on the merits of the case, and as far as we’re concerned, it’s a sound case. All it said is that the timing is off,” said Elliott Negin, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
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