Reader Comments
Post a new comment on this article
Post Your Discussion Comment
Please follow our guidelines for comments and review our competing interests policy. Comments that do not conform to our guidelines will be promptly removed and the user account disabled. The following must be avoided:
- Remarks that could be interpreted as allegations of misconduct
- Unsupported assertions or statements
- Inflammatory or insulting language
Thank You!
Thank you for taking the time to flag this posting; we review flagged postings on a regular basis.
closeNeed for Information on Full Impacts of Nuclear Fuel Cycle in US
Posted by Sarah_Fields on 07 Oct 2010 at 15:37 GMT
The responses to my earlier comment still do not provide information on the full land use impacts of the nuclear fuel cycle in the United States. This would include uranium mining and milling, in-situ leach uranium recovery, disposal of all nuclear waste from the dismantling of nuclear reactors, long-term disposal of spent fuel, chemical conversion of uranium, isotopic enrichment of uranium, and fabrication of uranium fuel, and disposal of depleted uranium and other types of waste from the conversion, enrichment, and fuel fabrication processes. The United States does not have the large uranium mines that are found in Canada and Australia.
Unfortunately, there has been a lack of research on the land use impacts of the nuclear fuel cycle and uranium mining over time for the US. Much of the uranium mining has occurred on federal lands subject to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), yet there has been no programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), nor site-specific EIS that has addressed the cumulative impacts of uranium mining in any section of the US where uranium mining has occurred and where impacts continue today, as would be expected under NEPA.