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Congressmen Pushing To Reopen Yucca Mountain
Bob the Super Hamste writes "CNN is reporting that a group of congressmen backed by the nuclear industry are pushing to reopen the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. The site has sat closed and uncompleted since the Obama administration scrapped the project. The article goes into the pros and cons of the Yucca Mountain site for storage and also brings up some interesting political issues involved in continuing development. It's also worth noting that there's been a fee on electric bills since 1983 for the building of the site."
And, as a bonus, if they start reprocessing the waste (and overturn Carter's executive order which outlawed the process), there will be enough storage in Yucca Mountain to store all the waste that will ever be made, until it's cooled, since most of the waste, by volume and mass, is just more fuel, and what IS really waste is hot enough to burn itself out on the scale of human life spans...
I remember working on some of the Yucca Mountain studies years ago and there really isn't a better place you could store nuclear waste. It's very stable geologically, and the storage medium leeching was practically non-existent, even if you stored the blocks under water.
Most of the objections are NIMBY related and don't represent any realistic threat.
I can promise you where nuclear waste is being stored now, where ever that is, is a lot less safe than it would be at Yucca Mountain.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Fun fact: the ban on reprocessing was lifted by Reagan. The government just isn't subsiziding it.