Information report on state legislation. 1984 Annual summary. Volume 10, Number 7

Due to situations beyond our control, and a need to re-direct our budget resources, this will be the last issue of The Information Report on State Legislation, NUREG/BR-0025. There have been several noteworthy events which have occurred since our last issue in July 1984. In the low-level waste area, the Midwest Compact was introduced in both Houses of Congress (S. 3091, H.R. 6937), for a total of five compacts to be considered for consent in the next congressional session (Northwest, Central, Rocky Mountain, Midwest and Southeast). All five must be re-introduced in the 99th Congress. Representative Morris Udall (D-AZ) has proposed a series of amendments to the compact bills and to the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act which address the problems of states without sites after the 1986 deadline. The amendments also concern issues such as volume reduction, the definition of low-level waste, and import/export of waste outside regional boundaries. The staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee also proposed certain conditions to Congressional consent for the compacts. The conditions included use of NRC-proposed consent language, the low-level waste definition and NRC report requirements. The Office of State Programs (OSP) held a workshop in May 1984 on shallow land burial and alternative low-level waste technologies. The Western Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact failed in the closing two days of the California Legislature, although it was enacted by Arizona, the only other eligible state. A working group on HLW siting, sponsored by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), convened December 4-6, 1984, in Las Vegas, Nevada, to inform key legislators and their staffs from the 23 states where DOE is conducting geologic studies for siting two HLW repositories about DOE's progress in implementing the Nuclear Waste Policy Act