Posted on 03/21/2011 5:22:38 PM PDT by jazusamo
Toying with waste storage exposes America to Japan-type disaster
The ongoing crisis at Japan’s damaged nuclear power plants raises the issue of whether our own radioactive materials are vulnerable to similar catastrophes. The states of South Carolina and Washington will argue today before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that the Obama administration had no authority to order the closing of the Yucca Mountain disposal facility in Nevada. That project’s purpose had been to move American plants away from the radioactive waste-storage model used in the land of the rising sun.
The worst of the radiation from the Fukushima Dai-ichi facility is not emanating from the reactor cores, but from pools where spent nuclear fuel rods are stored. Most spent fuel in the United States is stored in the same fashion or in dry casks located on-site at the nation’s 104 nuclear power facilities. Those were meant to be temporary depots that would be emptied when what was supposed to be the permanent storage site, Yucca Mountain, was completed. Instead, President Obama, with the strong encouragement of Nevada’s Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, has spent the past two years dumping obstacles in the path of the facility’s opening.
Even a left-leaning state like Washington is upset by this last-minute “not in my backyard” maneuver. The Evergreen State has been counting on the new repository to accept its 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste now stored at the Department of Energy’s 586-square-mile Hanford facility in the southeastern corner of the state...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
With Obama. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
November cannot come soon enough.
AMEN to you both!
Fiascoes are just the smoke and mirrors, Jaz.
It’s the deeper mephistophelian schemes that will do us in.
When will the Congress do its duty, and remove the CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER that faces this nation??
You know better than to use those big words with me bhf, but you’re right. :-)
I’d bet not soon enough, we’ll have to vote him out.
I have noticed the deafening silence on Yucca Mt. from the media in wake of the stored fuel problem in Japan.
It’s time to get serious about safely storing or disposing of our nuclear waste. It’s not just stuff from nuclear power plants, but a lot of other lower level radioactive waste too.
Your tag is hilarious!
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