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.
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.”