Letter: More nuclear waste dumped on SC

The Savannah River Site will be receiving more than 700 pounds of plutonium nuclear waste from Japan, where they plan to dilute the plutonium and eventually ship it to a low-level nuclear waste repository site in New Mexico.

Now the Department of Energy is considering allowing Germany to ship spent nuclear fuel containing highly enriched uranium to the Savannah River Site through the port of Charleston.

All of this in addition to the Department of Energy pressing Gov. Nikki Haley to reopen the Barnwell low-level nuclear waste repository to out-of-state users — a repository that already contains millions of gallons of radioactive waste.

New Jersey and Connecticut continue to dump their nuclear waste in South Carolina under an existing agreement. Now it appears the deal is changing again and could result in highly radioactive waste being dumped at Barnwell.

The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada, which was designed as the national solution for storing spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste, was defunded and closed in 2009. A deal between President Obama and then-Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada closed the Yucca Mountain project in a political quid-pro-quo, with nearly $12 billion of our tax dollars flushed down the political toilet.

Yet South Carolina continues to receive nuclear waste from outside the state without any national solution in sight. Our state and federal government continues to make bad decisions on managing nuclear waste and the people of South Carolina continue to get dumped on.

This story was originally published April 19, 2016 at 12:38 PM with the headline "Letter: More nuclear waste dumped on SC."