Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada has achieved his long-held plan of doing away with the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Following conversations with Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the White House, Senator Reid today announced that the administration and the Energy Department have agreed to cut off all funding to pursue a license application for the Yucca Mountain Project in the 2011 budget. It had been approved as the nation’s only permanent geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel and Department of Defense high-level radioactive waste.
“This is a major victory for Nevada,” Reid said. “I am pleased that President Obama has lived up to his promise to me and all Nevadans by working with me to kill the Yucca Mountain Project. I look forward to continuing my work with the President and his administration to find responsible, alternative solutions for dealing with nuclear waste.”
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The proposed site for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository is on federal land at the edge of the Nevada Nuclear Test site. The volcanic area has fractured, and critics expressed concerns that water moving through the fractures into the facility could corrode the containers holding the waste, releasing radioactivity into the environment.
#30- The government licensed every nuclear power plant in the US. The government has always been responsible for developing a final repository and they have dropped the ball. Blame the government if you are going to blame someone. Harry Reid in particular is a good person to blame for stopping a good, workable solution.
#24 said, Greg Allen, said:
“Can we encase the crap in ultra-reinforced concrete and store them at the bottom of an ocean trench?”
I say encase it (the crap) in concrete or seal it up in glass balls like the French do or just leave it in U.S.-style impenetrable steel casks. Then park ’em in an ocean trench, like #24 says, but near a subduction zone & they will be inhaled into the innards of the earth & recycled. No more worries.
All the preceeding rhetoric aside, I have in my library an interesting book about how to label the site for future generations. Remarkable. The problem is that the site would be deadly for tens of thousands of years, and in that time, cultures and languages would be lost, so the big problem is to devise a warning that would be coherent far, far, far in the future. Examples were shown, but another problem is that anything that indicated “DANGER!” also would potentially invite exploration to see what the hell is so important.
I love how moss completely owned jbensen2.
You’ve been owned son, now go to the corner and shut your mouth.
The waste could be disposed of easily and cheaply.
Just make it into flag pins and then give them out at the next Republican Convention.
Two problems solved.
Yet more blatant lies from the anti-nuclear ‘stop all industrialisation’ loud crowd.
This mountain was never needed in the first place if reprocessing turned deathly radiating fuel rods into new fuel rods and desperately needed nuclear isotopes for medicine. I hope the first reprocessing remix plant being built somewhere east of mississippi does not get the same shameful treatment.
Next biggest lie was that 3-mile leaked radiation.
But the biggest lie of all was the outrageous cost of civil nukes. Go figure how a gram equivalent of nuclear fuel versus fossil fuel in the near future leads to near zero long term costs. Those early claims were RIGHT! Of course you have to shield the reactor and be proliferation resistant (main task is to avoid jars of plutonium which some processing schemes enable).
The proposed site for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository was never going to hold nuclear waste. It was actually a giant bunker meant to preserve a remnant of humanity from the coming devastating calamity. A nuclear dump was considered to be the ultimate cover story that would
keep those not selected for survival from trying to obtain the stores from within the facility. New arrangements have now been made for the selected few.
Now that you know what will you do? Time is running out.
#30: NRC and the Yucca Mountain Project didn’t drop the ball. Reid funded the research until it was obvious that they had a good design that would be approved by NRC. Then he pulled the money for the license application from the project to get himself re-elected (most Nevada voters aren’t all that smart).
Once Reid dies (he’s 70) or gets voted out of office, the license funding will be restored (or will be paid for by the nuclear power companies) and the Project will continue.
Will Cheney have to move his office as well?
Yea, not a surprise that this administration is against nuclear power. Just as they cut back on oil drilling offshore and on federal lands(I thought that was the liberals position?)
Well then they better not plan to build any more nuclear power plants, or keep the existing ones running, until they find a place to haul their waste to. They plants can’t keep stockpiling their own waste forever. That more dangerous, than taking it to a properly engineered waste handling facility. Cause the power plants aren’t properly designed for this purpose.
If Yucca Mountain isn’t good enough, then why not put the stuff back where most of it came from? Uranium ore get mined from somewhere. And its been Ok, existing, wherever that is. So spend fuel rods (I know, it’s Plutonium now) ought to be just find, tucked away in already excavated sections of these mines. Yucca Mountain could still be used for all the low level waste, like contaminated tools, pipes, and such.
Who cares about the waste? We need more power. Making do with less is not an option. If the gov’t does not begin construction on 100 new nuclear plants by August 31 they should all be exectued for treason. No stupid environmental studies or other delaying crap, Start Building Now. Use the waste as an Ice Cream topping for all I care. We need more power.
>cultures and languages would be lost, so the big problem is to devise a warning that would be coherent far, far, far in the future.
The big problem is the culture and language being lost. If someone else is taking over, then I don’t much care about labelling.
#43, Lyin’ Mike,
Those with children and future genes do care. Maybe cranky, stupid, lonely old men that hate the world and don’t care about anything do, but they can just shut the eff up in my opinion.
There have been numerous objections to disposing of waste in Yucca Mountain. The problem is actually very complicated. I guess you have to put the toxic stuff somewhere, but to me the Yucca Mountain approach seemed a lot like sweeping dirt under a rug.
“The proposed site for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository is on federal land at the edge of the Nevada Nuclear Test site. The volcanic area has fractured, and critics expressed concerns that water moving through the fractures into the facility could corrode the containers holding the waste, releasing radioactivity into the environment.”
From Investors Business Daily:
This is quite simply wrong, ignoring that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission-approved casks that the “waste” will be transported in are virtually indestructible. Tests carried out at the Sandia National Laboratories included an 18-wheeler carrying a transport cask being smashed into a 700-ton brick wall at a speed of 81 mph; testers dropping a cask from 2,000 feet onto hard ground; and a 120-ton locomotive train ramming a cask at 80 mph.
The Department of Energy has long studied the rock at the planned repository to assess how the repository would perform over tens of thousands of years. After 20 years and $9 billion, DOE found Yucca Mountain to be quite stable and safe.”