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."
About time. We are fussing about whether this will be safe after 10,000 years and meanwhile we store the waste in overcrowded pools spread around the country and continue to burn coal, which is an environmental disaster all by itself, never mind what it does to the climate.
It's not perfect, but dry cask storage in Yucca Mountain is way better than rods in spent fuel pools in power plants.
There's been worry about shipping spent fuel rods around, but the casks are very tough (they will survive being hit by a locomotive), and the worst cases are far, far less dangerous than a failed spent fuel pool at a power plant, as we now know.
This is yet another case of anti-nukers actually making the world a more dangerous and costly place. If the anti-nukers would just shut the fuck up and let intelligent people actually move forward, things would be way better all the way around. As is, everything is more dangerous and far, far, far more expensive than would otherwise be required if anti-nukers would simply shut the fuck up.
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.
But that's exactly why the anti-nuclear nutters oppose it; they love nuclear accidents because it helps them campaign to end nuclear power... the last things they want are safe reactors and safe waste disposal.