OPINION:
Harry Reid almost got away with wasting billions of the taxpayers’ money on a big hole in the ground in his home state of Nevada. With the senator from Searchlight moving swiftly toward retirement, the enormous bunker beneath Yucca Mountain will soon be the needed storage bin for America’s spent nuclear fuel. And not a day too soon. The radioactive waste has been accumulating for years at unsecured sites across the continent.
The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will review the science behind a permanent nuclear waste repository at a hearing Friday, and consider the consequences of further delaying the use of Yucca Mountain. “It’s been over 30 years since Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, yet we still haven’t fixed our nuclear waste problems,” says Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois, the chairman of the subcommittee. “The unlawful closure of Yucca Mountain was a major setback, but I believe we are now headed back on the right track as the licensing process continues.”
Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas in the desolate reaches of the Nevada desert, was selected in 1987 as the site of a deep geological repository that would store the nation’s radioactive waste safely for 10,000 years. With a main tunnel five miles long, Yucca Mountain was intended to begin accepting nuclear material in 1998, but Mr. Reid’s relentless “not in my backyard” campaign delayed using it for years.
The federal government, however, continued to require electric power companies across the country to contribute to a Nuclear Waste Fund, making them pay for something the government couldn’t deliver. Only the federal government can get by with such thievery. The fund collected $36 billion before a federal judge stopped the scam. Despite the billions spent studying, planning and digging the hole, there was no prospect of using it until now.
With the court ordering the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license the repository and the president and the former leader of the Senate majority on the way out, up to 74,000 tons of nuclear waste, having accumulated at 121 sites in 39 states, can soon be moved to Yucca Mountain.
Environmental extremists who favor all things green hoped that by stopping up the disposal system, like clogging a toilet, they could force a halt to the generation of nuclear power. Instead, they have endangered the environment — and their fellow humans — by requiring utilities to store nuclear waste in temporary locations close to major population centers, more vulnerable to terrorists than in the remote Nevada wilds.
Opposition to using Yucca Mountain, some of it more spiteful than scientific, has ranged from fanciful to entertaining. In one Hollywood movie, dinosaur eggs hatch under the mountain and the prehistoric beasts ruin everything. In another movie a mysterious Godzilla egg hatches in the radioactive heat of Yucca Mountain, and an enormous monster escapes to do what a Godzilla does.
In real life, the damage has been political, but the movement afoot to finally start filling up the hole is real. Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison, a long-standing opponent of using Yucca Mountain to store the lethal waste, is the new chairman of the Marco Rubio presidential campaign in Nevada, and subject to pressure from Mr. Rubio’s campaign. With no fear of Godzilla or Harry Reid, Mr. Rubio has been a strong advocate of using Yucca Mountain. Delays, like elections, have real consequences.
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