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Pulling back the curtains on wage-theft enforcement in MN; Trump's latest attack is on RFK, Jr; NM LGBTQ+ equality group endorses 2024 'Rock Star' candidates; Michigan's youth justice reforms: Expanded diversion, no fees.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says rebuilding Baltimore's Key Bridge will be challenging and expensive. An Alabama Democrat flips a state legislature seat and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman dies at 82.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

Court: Don’t Fool With Idaho

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Tuesday, April 1, 2008   

Boise, ID - Idaho and the federal government are likely to be "talkin' trash" very soon, now that a federal court has ruled that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) must make good on a 1998 agreement to clean up buried nuclear waste. Meetings to come up with removal plans are expected to be announced soon.

Beatrice Brailsford with the Snake River Alliance, Idaho's nuclear watchdog, says DOE has no more excuses to delay dealing with the radioactive waste.

"It's very important from here on out that the DOE knows that Idaho is a state that is going to hold the department to its word."

The DOE objected to the deal after the fact, saying the language in the agreement didn't actually require waste to be dug up. Two federal courts have disagreed.

The nuclear trash was shipped to Idaho in the 1950s and '60s from the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado. It was buried in unlined pits above the Snake River Aquifer, the state's largest underground water supply.

Brailsford says because of the nature of radioactivity, it's not realistic to think all the waste will be cleared out, but she says significant portions can be dug up and isolated to lessen the risk to the aquifer.

"The cost of cleanup is hundreds of billions of dollars. That is an obligation our government has to people who live near DOE sites."

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a federal district court decision that requires the DOE to clean up the radioactive waste. The DOE has time for another appeal.


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