Yucca Mountain Project cost jumps to $96 billion

Las Vegas Review-Journal ^

[Deek1969]

WASHINGTON -- The Department of Energy announced in a new report this morning the estimated total cost to build and operate a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository would be $96.2 billion.

Counting inflation, the price tag increased by 67 percent over the department's most recent published estimate, which was $57.5 billion in 2001.

[Gondring]

Absolutely AMAZING how such HUGE and COSTLY projects are mere trifles compared to what we’ve dumped into Iraq.

DECADES of study and litigation and all for Yucca Mtn...and we could get DOZENS of them for the cost of Iraq. Whew....we could have been running on fission for quite a while by now.

[Freedom4US]

Quite the hole in the ground, eh?

[Royal Wulff]

It’s all lawyers

[The Duke]

Milkin’ it!

[Centurion2000]

Glass Cubes on the bottom of the Laurentian Abyssal with 7 mils of water shielding would make a wonderful disposal site as well.

Or how about Monterrey Bay in California? The dang thing is only 2 miles deep 4 miles off the coast.

[Spktyr]

There’s more than 250 years of fuel in the stockpiles awaiting Yucca Mountain. The only reason we have a nuclear waste storage problem and none of the other nuclear powers do is because we can’t reprocess and recycle the fuel rods to be used again.

Thanks, Jimmuh Cahtah and the Dems.

[driftdiver]

On the other hand we could have used Clintons tactics for fighting terrorism and not had to worry about any big projects.

[ballplayer]

a bargain compared to the BIG DIG IN BOSTON that the Fat Pig Kennedy loves

[xcamel]

And envirowacko lawsuits...

[Stirner]

I have yet to hear a good argument against deep sea disposal. We currently keep nuclear waste in pools of water only 15 feet deep, apparenty safely. We have nuclear subs (Thresher, Kursk) on the ocean floor, loaded with fuel and I haven’t heard of any problems from them. The only hint of a reason why this would be a bad idea I have heard is that it would somehow affect sea life at the disposal site. But it sounds to me that the worst case would be killing all the fish closer than 15 feet, which, in a miles deep ocean trench, would be almost nothing. Is there something I’m missing?

[Wonder Warthog]

"Is there something I’m missing?"

Only one thing. Before dumping the stuff in the Mindanao Trench, you definitely want to extract all the fissionables and recycle them back into reactors. A poster up-thread pointed out that with waste processing to remove and reuse the fissionables, we have 250 years of usable energy already mined waiting.

[kidd]

As a reminder to my fellow Freepers:

Yucca Mountain constuction is paid for by the utilities, not Federal spending. On average, you all paid an additional 0.1 cents per kilowatt for the construction of Yucca Mountain.

However, Federal money IS being spent. By law, the U.S. government was required to begin picking up the waste 10 years ago. It didn’t — and electrical utilities filed over 60 lawsuits. Aside from the cost of reviewing the numerous studies, the Federal government has paid out $390 million to the utilities to compensate the utilities for the cost of keeping the waste on site.

So the longer the opening is delayed, the more we will all spend.

[WellyP]

My extremely good contacts say Yucca Mt. is totally safe and my contacts know exactly what they are talking about.

[count-your-change]

The reason they say it's safe is because it is. More years of study and spending won't make it more safe than it already is and the waste is going some where some time so Yucca Mt. is the best place available.
The anti-nuke crowd knows that if nukes have no place to store waste and cannot reprocess it the next step is shut down the plants, their goal in the first place.

[aruanan]

Yucca Mountain Project cost jumps to $96 billion

A huge portion of this expenditure comes not from attempts to make something safe that cannot be made safe but from people claiming that it cannot be made safe and agitating for ever greater expenditures with the aim of then pointing at the expenditures as proof of what they all along had claimed to be true.

[darth]

Damn straight! The idiot dims have got us BURYING A SOURCE OF ENERGY! Even the isotopes can be used to make radiothermal generators or irradiate food for processing. It boggles this engineer’s mind.

[Spktyr]

I didn’t mean that it was a problem *that* way. I meant that the problem is that we have to build Yucca so large in the first place.

[mysterio]

It costs twice as much as 2001 because our government has devalued our dollar through deficit spending.

[Beelzebubba]

So, in 2001, the cost was 6500 tons of gold.

Now the cost is 3455 tons of gold. Looks like the cost went down, and the US dollar stinks.

(My figures may be slightly off because ignored any Troy details, and treated units as standard. I also ignored any inflation adjustments in those dollar figures.)

[Kevmo]

So it’s about $100B to store nuclear waste. I wonder how much of that is Military/Medical waste vs. energy production waste. Whatever the answer is, nuclear power aint “too cheap to meter”.