Nuclear waste deal approved
Washington The federal government on Friday approved a $3.1 billion plan by a private corporation to store tens of thousands of tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste on a Native American reservation in Utah, potentially removing a major obstacle to the nuclear industry’s ambitions for renewed growth.
The move paves the way for the industry to circumvent a lengthy political stalemate over a proposed public nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and could rid dozens of nuclear plants around the country of the need to store radioactive products that will remain dangerous for centuries.
Environmental groups and Utah officials said the decision raised the risk of an accident or a deliberate attack and promised to challenge it in court. One faction of the deeply divided Skull Valley Band of Goshutes, which has agreed to be host to the facility, said the nuclear waste would debase sacred ground and destroy tribal culture.
Friday’s decision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to grant a license for the facility cemented a pact made nearly a decade ago between strange bedfellows: utility behemoths that wanted to get tons of radioactive waste off their hands and a Native American tribe that was willing to offer its land in exchange for an undisclosed sum of money.
While public waste storage plans such as that at Yucca Mountain have been plagued by political maneuvering and fights in Congress, Private Fuel Storage LLC, the company that will build the new facility, successfully argued that their agreement is between a private corporation and a sovereign tribe, and therefore was not subject to the same degree of public review.
Former Klan leader returned to prison
Philadelphia, Miss. A judge sent Edgar Ray Killen back to prison Friday after finding that the former Ku Klux Klan leader, convicted for the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers, was in better health than the court had been told.
Four law enforcement officers and a convenience store owner testified they had seen Killen driving during the past two weeks. But at an August court hearing, the 80-year-old sawmill owner and preacher had testified he was in constant pain and confined to a wheelchair.
Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon decided to revoke the $600,000 bond that had allowed Killen to remain free while appealing his manslaughter convictions. He spent 53 days in prison following his June conviction.
Civil judgment issued against BTK serial killer
Wichita, Kan. The daughter of one of the 10 victims of BTK serial killer Dennis Rader won a $250,000 default judgment against him Friday in the first of nine lawsuits filed by families.
Judge Timothy Lahey granted the maximum allowable under Kansas law in the lawsuit filed by Carolyn Hook in the 1985 death of her mother, Marine Hedge.
Rader, who is representing himself in the civil cases, did not attend Friday’s hearing. A default judgment was granted because Rader did not respond to the lawsuit in time.
Rader, who called himself BTK for “bind, torture and kill,” pleaded guilty to 10 killings carried out from 1974 to 1991 and was sentenced in August to 10 consecutive life terms.
Hook’s attorney, James McIntyre, told the judge that she does not want Rader to profit from the killings.