Funny. Republicans were eager to prosecute Clinton for lying about an affair, but won’t prosecute lying to build a project that could kill people.
Full disclosure on Yucca Mountain
Critics of the Yucca Mountain Project have long maintained that the federal government will do anything to keep its heavy equipment humming northwest of Las Vegas.
As research has uncovered flaws in designs of the planned nuclear waste repository, the Department of Energy has spared no expense in attempting to remedy them, insisting each fix would be good enough to meet arbitrary health and radiation standards. Over the years, even as congressional audits exposed shoddy management, wasted resources and questionable science, the federal government has stuck to its assumptions that nuclear waste is best kept inside a mountain, and that Southern Nevada has the only mountain suitable for the repository.
But last year’s disclosure that U.S. Geological Survey employees might have fabricated and falsified data to satisfy quality assurance bureaucrats took the project’s reputation to a new low. E-mail messages sent by government hydrologists between 1998 and 2000 suggested they made up dates, deleted some information and submitted official documents with data that did not match their own records related to water infiltration at the repository.
The allegation that well-paid federal scientists and contractors were using bogus information to prop up a project that already has cost billions of dollars hinted at a massive fraud against taxpayers. Congressional hearings and an inquiry by the Energy Department’s inspector general followed. In December, the inspector general finished its investigation and forwarded its findings to the U.S. attorney’s office in Nevada.
On Tuesday, Energy Department Inspector General Gregory Friedman announced that the e-mails “did not meet the level of criminality,” and that the U.S. attorney’s office “could not show intent” to commit crimes. As a result, no criminal charges would be pursued.
Oh, yeah. Almost forgot. Don’t think this will affect you? The government wants to build more Yucca Mountain-like facilities elsewhere starting with Utah. And as for what’s happening in England.
Here’s an interesting article on a very Republican site about how screwed up the whole process of dealing with nuke waste is.
If BSing to keep your job became illegal, we’d all be in prison!
Well that’s good. I assume,than, that you believe Clinton should have never been impeached. I mean, after all, all he was doing was BSing in order to keep his job.
JD, does that mean you believe these guys here should be prosecuted to keep things equal?
#1: if bs’ing to keep your job meant polluting and forever ruining humongous swaths of our great nation with deadly radioactive waste, killing god knows how many americans in the process over the next few centuries, you should not just be in jail you should be classified an enemy combatant and sent to gitmo to live out your days in a chain-link cage, no lawyers, no red cross, just sit there for the rest of your life and think about how many americans you might have killed, given the chance.
yeah, if a foreigner did this, they’d be called a terrorist, and the whole project would called be a “dirty bomb” and some 3rd world nation would be gettin bombed right now.
The link to the “interesting article on a very Republican site” is indeed interesting, but not quite as much as the outcome of the survey being run in the left sidebar.
Out of 3774 votes (4/27 at 9AM) 56% voted for “misled and should be impeached.” 1% for “did not mislead but should be impaeached for other crimes” and 5% for “did mislead but not accountable” and, The Base, 34% says “no did not mislead, and should not be impeached.”
A conservative site? Who knows if someone is hacking the results (but we know we can trust electronic voting without verification, right?). But is it possible that a portion of the GOP is reaching saturation?
Bill Clinton lied to a federal judge. Does really matter what he lied about. You lie to a federal judge and you’re the president, you should be impeached. Clouding the issue doesn’t change that fact.
You’re right MG:
“Does really matter what he lied about.”
I guess we’ve moved past Yucca Mountain here, but I’ll jump 😉 I actually supported the impeachment of Clinton because lying under oath is very serious, although I did not support his removal from office. So imagine my disappointment when I learned that one of Bush’s preconditions for agreeing to answer questions before the 9/11 Commission was that he would not take the oath to give truthful answers under penalty of perjury. His other precondition was that Dick Cheney would have to be present during those discussions. Needless to say, I really wish Bush would have been put in the position that any untruthful answers could be considered an impeachable offense. I just have a hunch that not everything he told the commission was true.
As for removal from office, a separate consideration after impeachment, Bush has positioned himself well, with a vice-president that not even the most rabid anti-Bush activist would ever want to see move into the White House. I chuckle when I hear so much talk of impeaching and removing Bush as if some people don’t seem to realize that Dick Cheney would be President. Well played, Mr. Bush, well played indeed!
as to removal,
HOw about 2/3’d of most of our government.
FBI, CIA, DEA, INS….you NAME it..
WHAT has happened to THOSE we hire to run this country?
They USED to be,
BUSNESS owners,
They used to only be paid a STIPEND(look it up) Then go back home to WORK.
They USED to be knowledgable persons, NOW they are morons(most anyway).
NOW we pay these folks to PAY big companies to Look up a words in the dicionary…DUH!!!
Gary Marks:
Dick Cheney would drop dead in a week.
Gig – Doesn’t matter when it happened – it matters who responds to it. The response has been “lalalalalala… not a problem… lalalalala”
Doesn’t matter who is in power, that isn’t good enough.
Christ I’m sick of people shifting the blame to a Rep vs Dem or Bush vs Clinton thing.. this is plain Fucking Retarded and Dangerous Stupidity vs The Public
The half life of Plutonium 239 is 24,000 years. Nothing within our current technology could last a fraction of that time. All you can do is pass the buck for a few generations and hope they develop a solution, if they’re still around. Hopefully they will be able to drill a shaft and dump it back into the mantle.
ha ha… In Perú the Yuca is a tuber like a potato, but we also use the term “Yuca” in slang when we mean “lie” or “con”, often with a pollitical connotation…
For all I care, they should just mix it in some concrete and ship it off to the local landfill, where it would be fully contained and buried in 24hrs flat. What about when the government test-detonates nuclear weapons and shoots up a 500-ft mushroom cloud next to major population centers, where it poisons citizens, the air they breath, the homes where they raise their children, their water supply reservoirs, and especially their pets????? Is that not a problem?? And no, they do not always keep hundreds of miles away from anything that breathes (see downwinders.org). Nuclear energy is not a problem; nuclear weapons are the problem.
You powder the waste, mix it into melted glass and make glass bricks. Stack them in an old salt mine. You’re now fine. Problem solved.
We need nuclear power. We need wind, hydroelectric, solar, geothermal, biofuel, zero-point energy and every other type of power we can think of too. What we don’t need is any “solution” that requires an American citizen to sacrifice or cut down on anything. That is not acceptable.
The nuclear industry in France is about the only thing they’ve done right. They give tours of nuclear power plants, and are very open about everything. They deal with the waste by creating “public laboratories” that will be manned by scientists to look after it forever.
Our government employees have jobs for life, and Social Security etc has locked us into ongoing payments forever. I don’t see anything wrong with keeping it above ground and baby sitting it for 24000 years.
Or just build more freakin’ storage pools where it is. That’s gotta be cheaper than all this.
‘Kill people’?????
Kill THOUSANDS of people over hundreds of thousands of years….
“Kill THOUSANDS of people over hundreds of thousands of years….”
Unless one of the trains, some of which go through major cities, carrying the waste to the mountain crashes or derails and a cask ruptures releasing radiation onto the populous. Or there’s an earthquake — the mountain is surrounded by fault lines — in a few years that causes the radiation to get into the groundwater which makes it’s way to Las Vegas. Or there’s no earthquake and a cask ruptures or is eaten through by the caustic materials inside faster than anticipated (one of the issues which had fabricated data) and radiation leaches into the groundwater. And so on.
#20…uncle dave….there’s an intersting article from BBC World news today on what Finland is doing with it’s waste. Apparently Sweden is about to start their project based on the same idea as Finlands.
Here’s the link(i hope….lol)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4948378.stm
So what do you want to do with the nuclear waste that’s there now?
Its always interesting that OTHER countries do things NEW to create energy. But in the US, we dont tap ANY ideas.
Greenland is useing geothermal off the volcanoes…Why cant we?
Holland has embraced wind power…
WE GIVE, solar panels to Africa for powering wells, and equipment over there…WHY not give them away HERE?
FOR ALL that Nuke power can give us, its the WASTE that we cant get rid of. This is like pissing on your OWN floor, but SOME group must REALLY want it, as it keeps COMING back…SO, WHAT, its cheap energy, and we would pay for the power and then pay Again and again and again….. For getting RID of the waste. There isnt enough ROOM to get rid of it FOREVER…and THEN have it MADE SAFE…
SAFE from causing problems like…. Some terrorist gets ahold of some and makes a dirty bomb, thats like keeping the mexicans from crossing the BORDER….IT WONT WORK…
Yucca mountain was an extreamly flawed choice. I understand that it was picked back during the Clinton administration, but who actually picked it I’m not sure.
Stopping this now would be the best idea. The billions wasted would just be business as usual for the goverment. Then hire the Finnish geologists to come here and pick likely sites that would be safe. They wouldn’t have an axe to grind.
Burying this stuff 1500 feet or more below ground with just regular backfill will keep the terrorists away from it, unless they have a few months to kill digging that far down.
You guys need to check the link I put in my last post……those people have done there homework. Of course there are those who aren’t happy with it, but there is always someone, somewhere that isn’t happy with something.
Do you REALLy want to depend on Mother nature to protect, what MAN is trying to hide.
This is like a dog hiding its poop(landmine) in your yard… the DOG forgot about it, but you will find it, one way or another..