End deplorable Yucca delay

South Carolina has renewed its call for a federal court to cut through the fog of obfuscation generated by the Obama administration's effort to close the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals should comply.

The NRC has played a deplorable role by ducking its responsibility to provide a central safe disposal site.

So has President Obama, who ordered Energy Secretary Stephen Chu in 2009 to close the facility. Officials with the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, however, said in 2010 that the Yucca project couldn't be revoked without permission from Congress.

In response, NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko ordered that the licensing board be shut down and denied it funds to continue operating. Mr. Jaczko reaffirmed this order last month after the NRC again failed, on a tie vote, to accept or reject the licensing board order.

Last February, Mr. Jaczko laid out his strategy for avoiding a showdown on the legality of his actions, telling reporters, "Our overall focus is on closing our review of the license application. If there were unresolved legal questions, they would stay unresolved legal questions."

So far Mr. Jaczko's blatant efforts to avoid judicial review have succeeded. A three-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals found in July that the suit brought by South Carolina, Aiken County, the State of Washington and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners was not "ripe" for judgment because the NRC had not yet acted. The suit seeks to prevent the closing of Yucca Mountain.

The plaintiffs have since urged the court to order the NRC to follow its regular procedure and rule on the licensing issue.

The stakes are huge for South Carolina, with Savannah River Site currently serving as one of the nation's major nuclear waste disposal sites.

Unless Yucca Mountain is opened, SRS will continue to provide for waste disposal, even though the federal government has pledged that wouldn't happen.

Advocates of the Yucca project say the commission wrongly views a tie vote as allowing the Energy Department to proceed with closure. They point out that a federal appeals court tie does not invalidate a lower court action, but rather affirms it. As applied to the NRC, that protocol would keep the Yucca Mountain project alive, as intended by Congress.

The court should put an end to the legal obstructions created by Mr. Jaczko and the Obama administration.

Ultimately, that would mean consolidating high-level nuclear waste from scores of sites across the nation, and shipping it to a safe and secure central waste site in the interior of remote Yucca Mountain.