Nuclear energy

House Slaps Obama On Yucca Mountain, Nuclear Power

Energy: A green administration blocks the safe storage of nuclear waste and refuses even to acknowledge nuclear power has a future. But after the GOP House votes to open a safe site, the nuclear debate has been reopened.

Actually "waste" is an inaccurate term for the spent nuclear fuel rods still accumulating at above-ground fuel storage sites around the country, many near major cities. Spent nuclear fuel is a renewable resource that, in generating energy after being reprocessed, emits no greenhouse gasses.

But wait, critics shout, what about Fukushima and Chernobyl?

Certainly Russian incompetence and Japanese carelessness produced tragic results.

But considering that these same critics claim fossil fuels are ushering in planetary doom via climate change, shouldn't a greenhouse gas-free power source be reconsidered, one that to this day continues to provide around 20% of our power and safely powers our aircraft carriers and submarines?

Even if we don't build another nuclear power plant, spent fuel rods from existing facilities will continue to accumulate.

The Obama administration and folks like Nevada Democrat Sen. Harry Reid — whose state is home to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear storage site — don't want to have a safe storage facility, fearing it would usher in more nuclear plants.

ing that has been stopped dead in its tracks by the Obama administration. that has been stopped dead in its tracks by the Obama administration.

By a vote of 326-81, including 98 Democrats, the House on Wednesday approved an amendment by Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., to the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2013. It allocates $10 million for salaries and expenses for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to complete the licensing process for Yucca Mountain, something

.

The NRC doesn't need the money, but the House wanted to force its hand. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., noted that Congress has acted 32 times to support the use of Yucca Mountain.

"Allowing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission such power, to effectively cancel Yucca Mountain after Congress has enacted a law directing that it be accomplished, would be an affront to the Constitution," Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., said last week.

"The Yucca Mountain project failed and is now a relic of the past," Reid said Wednesday in reaction to the House vote. "Proposals to resurrect it are akin to throwing billions of taxpayer money down a hole without any possibility that nuclear waste will ever be dealt with."

Right. Better to throw billions down the global warming and green energy hole.

Nuclear waste has to be dealt with, and we've already thrown billions at the problem. As Citizens Against Government Waste notes, "DOE (Department of Energy) has spent $15 billion to evaluate various possible sites, to develop Yucca Mountain and to submit the licensing application, but the national inventory of spent nuclear fuel stands at 65,000 metric tons, and not one spent fuel rod has been moved to the Yucca Mountain facility."

The spent fuel rods are stored at 75 sites in 33 states. They're stored in cooling pools or, when the pools have reached capacity, in expensive dry cask storage facilities adjacent to operational reactor sites.

About 161 million Americans live within 75 miles of these sites. About 1,800 tons of these rods, for example, are stored at the Zion nuclear plant north of Chicago, a football field away from Lake Michigan.

Yet Reid and President Obama consider leaving them where they are safer than storing them at Yucca Mountain.

The DOE spent two decades studying Yucca and found the site to be safe and geologically stable. The spent rods, stored 1,000 feet under a mountain, are unlikely to be disturbed by 9.0 quakes or 40-foot tsunamis.

New reactor designs have made future Fukushimas and Chernobyls unlikely. Nuclear power has already cleansed the atmosphere of billions of tons of slow-death pollutants. Let's finish Yucca Mountain.