WASHINGTON - February 7 - Note to reporters: The Bush administration’s Department of Energy (DOE) on Monday unveiled its proposed “Global Nuclear Energy Partnership,” GNEP. GNEP is aimed at jump-starting the moribund nuclear power industry, not only in the U.S. but also internationally. In exchange for agreeing to not develop uranium enrichment or irradiated nuclear fuel reprocessing – technologies that can be used to manufacture nuclear weapons -- the Bush administration is offering to take other countries’ commercial high-level radioactive wastes for permanent disposal in the U.S. We offer the following statement for citation and quotation on this issue. Our spokespeople are available for further comment by calling: 202.328.0002.

Statement of Kevin Kamps, NIRS Nuclear Waste Specialist, regarding the Bush Administration’s “Global Nuclear Energy Partnership” Unveiled Monday

“As a Texan, George W. Bush, should be familiar with the Lone Star State’s proverb ‘The First Rule of Holes’ which declares: “when you’re in one, stop digging”. Yet despite our country’s vexing – and currently insurmountable - nuclear waste dilemma, the Bush administration’s ‘Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP)’ announced on Monday by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) would bury the U.S. under a mountain of radioactive garbage, some of it even originating from overseas atomic reactors.

“The DOE, faced with a faltering waste repository program at Yucca Mountain, is hedging its bets. While still insisting that any future for U.S. nuclear power will necessitate a permanent geologic repository, it is clutching at a new straw – reprocessing. Yet reprocessing, far from easing the waste burden, is a dirty, dangerous and expensive process that extracts plutonium from irradiated fuel and increases the amount of nuclear waste and radioactivity already routinely released into our air and water by operating reactors that contaminate our communities and jeopardize our health and safety.

“The DOE’s argument in favor of the Yucca Mountain option must have been conjured from a magician’s book of illusion. The agency continues to trumpet the mathematical fantasy that ‘Yucca Mountain, Nevada, has the technical capability to accommodate all the used U.S. commercial nuclear fuel that has been or will be generated by U.S. nuclear power plants over their lifetimes.’ In reality, currently operating U.S. nuclear reactors will generate enough waste to fill Yucca Mountain to its legal limit by as early as 2008.

“Add to that the thousands of tons that would continue to be generated by existing reactors, plus the waste from the proposed new reactors and the agency’s numbers flunk a grade school math test.

“Now factor in the proposal to import irradiated nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive wastes from other countries – waste that Bush has offered to permanently dispose of in the U.S. – and the waste mountain grows even higher.

“The GNEP plans do nothing to ease this country’s waste burden while contributing alarmingly to our nuclear insecurity. Such flagrant denials and deceptions by the DOE about the radioactive waste dilemma are disturbing and dangerous.”

###