Posted on 03/01/2009 8:30:01 AM PST by Robert A Cook PE
President Obama won't allow radioactive waste to be buried at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, rejecting the long-controversial project after 20 years of planning at a cost of at least $9 billion.
Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu "have been emphatic that nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain is not an option, period," said department spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller. The budget plan Obama released yesterday "clearly reflects that commitment," she said.
"The new administration is starting the process of finding a better solution for management of our nuclear waste," she said in an e-mail.
The decision leaves unresolved a long-term plan for nuclear waste, primarily from power plants, even as utilities seek to build more reactors.
Under the disputed proposal, nuclear waste from reactors around the nation was to be shipped to Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, to be stored in tunnels 1,000 feet underground. The Energy Department had plans to bury more than 109,000 metric tons.
Radioactive waste is now spread among more than 120 sites in 39 states, according to the Energy Department. There are 104 operating commercial reactors in the United States, and 17 applications are pending at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build 26 more reactors.
Obama's plan would not curtail work on new reactors, said Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents the industry.
Nevada opponents and environmental groups have filed lawsuits seeking to block the storage project on grounds that Yucca Mountain could be subject to earthquakes and that transporting waste across 43 states would create a hazard and a potential target for terrorists.
Under Obama's budget plan, the administration would devise a new strategy on waste. Spending on Yucca would be limited to the costs of meeting a legal requirement to process an application that former President George W. Bush submitted in June. The Energy Department didn't meet a contractual obligation to take possession of nuclear waste by 1998, and has been found liable in court to claims by utilities for compensation for storing it
"That sounds like pretty big news. Not just Obama but the new energy guy rule out further work on Yucca mountain.
Vague references toward working toward a new plan.... any ideas what that would be ? Any idea how much further funding is allocated in the spending bill toward that end?
One would think it would be a political challenge to license any new reactors in absence of some viable plan."
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Oh Shitte.
Carter refused to allow recycling (an essentially endless and internal nuclear fuel option that creaets more fuel than it uses) because he feared terrorist could get the recyclked fuel.
Well, Pelosi and ABBCNNBCBS have "decided" that Iran and North Korea should get a nuclear enrichment plants anyway - without interference from Israel or the US - so I suppose that little problem has been dealt with.
Without Yucca Flats, the rest of the long term nuclear development is dead. Until one of the three heads of this communist "administration" is separated from its seat of power.
THAT created the price rises that destroyed everything else from mid-2008 until the election.
Wow. Where will they put it then?
I guess there’s some land in Chicago they can store it at.
I wonder if we can buy the facility for $1, or something.
Send it to Kenya.
Although Obama has decreed that we will not store nuke waste in the Yucca mountains, I believe that this is an unintended good decision on his part.
He did it purely to appeal to the “No Nukes” crowd.
I have always believed that storing nuke waste in a dormant volcano was a really dumb thing to do.
We absolutely need a nuke waste storage facility and I hope there is an alternate site upon which this task can be purposed. I propose Chicago, New York City, or Detroit. Actually Detroit makes the most sense, since theywon’t be building cars ther for much longer.
B.H.O. and his administration = tools.
How many ways does this guy know of to wreck the country. And he's just getting started.
I've heard North Dakota mentioned. No earthquake risk, lots of appropriate rocky ground to drill storage tunnels into, closer to the majority of American nuclear plants, and the state would probably be happy to have the jobs. Probably should have been the choice in the first place.
OJ found the real murderer, didn't he?
It's a lie to allow the budget to pass while killing Yucca Mountain.
They have no intention of finding another way.
It's like Obama's lie on the campaign trail. He once said he liked nuclear power, but I swear he also said he did not like it at other venues. That was a lie to take away the "Obama is against nucler power" issue from the race.
His intention is to kill nuclear and coal power. He further intends to leave us only wind and solar, with demand side management (rolling blackouts, CFL lights, reduced power use at home and work) to fill the gap......It's the greenie way.
He will break it up into portions and send it to the upper water sheds of every red state. No kidding!
People have underestimated what a hateful man Obama is. And soon we will see it in spades as populist resistance to his socialist boondogle economic policy quickens.
" I won" will become," You are under arrest for creating an insurrection against the president."
Homeland Security will likely become a politicaal instrument of the continuing Obama Campaign puppet political industry. It makes trillions in profits each year by stealing from the so called rich.
Obama is a pirate.
A fascist pirate.
It's Yucca Mountain.
Hopefully this will at least end the endless lawsuits over the project. The results of one of which required projecting conditions at the site, including human activity, not the original 10,000 years into the future,but beyond that to the time of maximum risk, however long that might be (and which would be somewhat dependent on those projections). 10,000 years in the past gets you to the time when men where just learning to plant crops, rather than just harvesting what grew naturally. Which of course makes it before the growth of anything that could reasonably be called "civilization".
What a bunch of Maroons!
The south side of Chicago would make a better choice.
Why would this jugeared idiot make such a call? Either he knows the technical difficulties of dealing with waste storage and has a better idea or, he is intentionally provoking further destruction of our country—which is it? The stinking smell of stale BO gets ever stronger and more people will eventually get the drift if they stand downwind.
We don't want to neutralize it. Nuke waste is only nuke waste because it's too radioactive to shove into a landfill, but not radioactive enough to use as fuel. If we had a decent way to separate out the radioactive isotopes, we could use the radioactive isotopes and dump the not-so-radioactive remainder.
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