Would you want it in *your* backyard?
It's being shoved down our throats. Yucca Mountain is 80 miles NW of Las Vegas. In some areas, 80 miles is an exurb! The waste is going to be shipped by rail and by truck through our city.
We have no nuc plants in NV. We have Hoover Dam, but here in LV, NV power still has to buy electricity from CA and my bill for a 2 bdrm apartment in JANUARY (no AC, minimal heat) is still $116+. I don't even get the benefit of cheap electricty from nuclear plants, but you want us to clean it up for the rest of the country? Ah, no thanks.
Where I grew up, in crowded Northern New Jersey, 80 miles was Pennsylvania!
But, other than NIMBY, what is it that Nevadans object to? Is it how the waste is stored? Whether radiation can be contained? Geological faults under the mountain?
I can see a concern about the trains coming through Las Vegas. But 80 miles is a long way off from civilization.
In NJ, we buried all the chemical waste from products that made this country great. NJ is the superfund capital of the country.
NJ has done its part. Can’t Nevada do its part? ;)
Nevadans have had atomic bomb blasts, all night casinos and the Bunny Ranch. And survived.
Plus NJ taxpayers paid into building the Hoover Dam in the 30s, when Las Vegas wasn’t even a gleam in Bugsy Siegel’s eye.. So you can thank them for the cheap electricity you enjoy today. In NJ, it’s about 12-14 cents/kwhr., and that’s with NJ’s handful of nuke plants, and those in surrounding states.
NJ lives with nuclear plants and millions of people surrounding them. Plus being sandwiched between two targets of the Cold War, DC and NYC. As well as one target of the Islamists on 9/11.
Yucca Mountain is in the middle of a desert. So who has more risk?