Hooray! As a resident of the Las Vegas area, this has been a big deal here for years. The problem wasn’t the dump itself, although many worried about the trains carrying the waste would be terrorist magnets despite tests that showed the casks were safe. It was that testing proved the location was dangerous. Reports of this were suppressed and fake reports written to advance the project by Bush & Co. Science perverted for political gain. Again.

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.