Senate Republicans are calling President Obama’s bluff on Yucca Mountain.
Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Senate are demanding the Obama administration provide scientific and legal evidence to support its decision not to store nuclear waste at the long-planned Yucca Mountain depository in Nevada.
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu testified at a congressional hearing in March that Yucca Mountain was no longer an option for holding radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and weapons complex sites around the country, repeating the position of President Barack Obama.
Republican senators want to know why Chu is against Yucca Mountain, given dozens of studies that show disposing of nuclear waste deep underground is the safest approach and the government has already spent billions of dollars to get the site ready.
“Given this history, President Obama’s memoranda that science will guide public policy and his commitment to an unprecedented level of openness, we find it difficult to reconcile your statement that Yucca Mountain is ‘not an option’ made after only six weeks in office,” the lawmakers said in a letter to Chu on Wednesday.
“Have you discovered, in a few short weeks, research that discredits the scientific work” that supports Yucca Mountain, they asked.
Moe Lane
Steve Maley
Dan McLaughlin
Neil Stevens
Daniel Horowitz
Good for them!
larueladue (Diary) Wednesday, May 6th at 1:22PM EST (link)Finally, someone to stand up against the enviro-herd stampede…
I actually worked on a project in the late ’70s as a college student, that had its funding somehow tied up in this (research on stratigraphy of ash flows, and such). It is amazing that this is still not in-place and functioning… The Lord moves in mysterious ways, and the Government moves in slow ways (and mostly in the wrong directions)…
It is amazing what politicians and lawyers can do...
settingsun (Diary) Wednesday, May 6th at 1:58PM EST (link)…do grind a project to a halt.
I thought the answer was simple: Harry Reid said NFW
bk (Diary) Wednesday, May 6th at 1:26PM EST (link)Who needs science?
Harry Reid prefers "political science"...
settingsun (Diary) Wednesday, May 6th at 1:59PM EST (link)…to actual science. At least when it comes to projects in his state.
No science on Yucca Mountain on both sides
Xasteius (Diary) Wednesday, May 6th at 2:20PM EST (link)Even if Yucca Mountain was opened tomorrow, it would be filled to capacity with the current amount of spent fuel at nuclear power plants. Yucca Mountain will have to be operated in conjunction with a reprocessing and advanced reactor program to reuse the uranium, plutonium, and other fissionable elements, thereby reducing the amount of waste actually stored.
Don’t leave the party, hijack it back!
The only poll that counts is the one at the ballot box.
I don’t want to be Reagan. I want to be a Chance/Soros hybrid.
So let's see. Somehow, using
ehosterman (Diary) Wednesday, May 6th at 11:04PM EST (link)Yucca Mountain for what it is designed is a bad thing because it’s not perfect? Your amazing display of logic blinds me. As a minimum, we’d get the fuel stored around the country off of the utilites hands. It may not be perfect or the final solution, but it’s better than where we are now. Oh by the way. It would also save the federal government (and you know the taxpayers) off of the hook for a several hundred billion dollar breach of contract judgement. The feds haven’t been collecting nuclear waste disposal fees from the utilities for nothing.
I'm basing my statements, ehosterman, on the
Xasteius (Diary) Thursday, May 7th at 12:51AM EST (link)current license (I’m not involved in any way on this, just what I’ve heard in my nuclear engineering classes).
1) The current plan is to seal Yucca once filled to capacity. Since It will be filled to capacity, what will we do after 20-40 years of continual operation, to say nothing of building more plants
as we generate 2000 metric tons of commercial SF per year? Building a new one is a political hot potato, and the only other option (if we still decide Yucca is the spot) is to expand the old one (DOE estimates around about 90 billion?, not too sure on the number).
2) The current time scale for environmental compliance is 1,000,000 years. Now at that time scale, any scientific model loses a lot of validity. With their ‘demand’ of evidence, the R’s have really opened themselves up to a fair amount of criticism.
What will probably happen is that the federal government will pay the utilities to keep their spent fuel. This will diminish the demand for Yucca (everyone likes free money) or it will be shipped to the middle of an Indian reservation in the desert (both perhaps?).
I’m not against Yucca; I’m against Yucca in the present form; “not perfect” is an understatement. If I were writing the license, I’d go for something like this:
1) open storage (don’t seal it) for reprocessing
2) review radiological history of Yucca during this period
3) synthetic analogs (minerals) for all waste products
The fuel will not get shipped anywhere until these environ-’mentalists’ are pacified.
Don’t leave the party, hijack it back!
The only poll that counts is the one at the ballot box.
I don’t want to be Reagan. I want to be a Chance/Soros hybrid.
That makes no sense
Finrod (Diary) Thursday, May 7th at 10:48AM EST (link)Your logic is like the people that object to expanding an overcrowded highway because the expansion will just get overcrowded too. Even if Yucca Mtn gets filled right away, wouldn’t it be better to have all that radioactive waste stored away somewhere rather than sitting around at dozens of nuclear power plants? At least if we shipped all this stuff to Yucca Mtn, then the nuclear plants would have somewhere to store their future waste, instead of having to expand their own local storage.
Let’s get down to brass tacks here. How much for the ape?
A brief summary of the YM positions, Finrod; my logic makes perfect sense.
Xasteius (Diary) Saturday, May 9th at 11:57AM EST (link)1) The current license: “open it, fill it, bury it for a million years” (no hyperbole)
2) The politicians/public: “Good riddance: out of sight, out of mind.” (my perception at least)
3) My understanding of your position: “Open it, fill it, let’s worry about the future later”.
4) My position: “Change the license and get it right the first time”
A consequence of your position implies that the original license must be changed (if that even can be done legally) to allow for the reuse of spent fuel. That only accounts for the current amount of spent fuel. What about 20 more years of reactor operation (due to the plant life extension licenses are underway), how do you account for 40000 MT of additional fuel? And if they go longer, you have another Yucca’s Mountain’s worth of SF to deal with!
(Great presentation here).
Don’t leave the party, hijack it back!
The only poll that counts is the one at the ballot box.
I don’t want to be Reagan. I want to be a Chance/Soros hybrid.
Rebates for $30 bn Yucca Mtn Payments: Lindsey Graham
pa Wednesday, May 6th at 4:08PM EST (link)I haven’t seen any blogs covering this yet (it showed up in my google news alert). Lindsey Graham has introduced a bill that would rebate 75% of the $30 billion paid into the Nuclear Waste Trust Fund by electric companies and their customers, now that Obama has all but killed the project by dropping funding from his proposed federal budget. Here’s the link for the entire article:
http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/2009/04/30/senator-calls-for-yucca-mountain-rebate.htm
pa
I think it may be a lot more than $30 billion.
ehosterman (Diary) Wednesday, May 6th at 11:06PM EST (link)I haven’t really followed the total in detail, but last year I was at a speech given by one of my former bosses, who was the head of the Yucca Mountain project and I believe he mentioned potential judgements closer to $180 billion in breach of contract judgements if it wasn’t opened.
We need to keep the Democrat's feet to the fire on this one. nt
tcgeol (Diary) Saturday, May 9th at 1:10PM EST (link)Just your typical bitter gun- and God-clinger
Even the Left admits we’re Right