Alan Caruba blogs that the American people have spent 30 years and 15 billion dollars to determine whether Yucca Mountain would be a safe repository for the U.S. civilian and defense-related nuclear waste. Compare that with the one year and 45 days it took to build the Empire State Building or the five years it took to build the Hoover Dam in the depths of the Great Depression. In the first half of the last century, Americans knew how to get things done, but the rise of environmentalism, aka adversarialism, in the latter half, starting around the 1970s, has increased the cost and time of any construction anywhere in the U.S. In the case of Yucca Mountain, it has raised issues about nuclear waste that is currently stored is less secure conditions.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has released the final two volumes of a five-volume safety report that concludes that the Nevada Yucca Mountain meets all of its technical and safety requirements for the disposal of highly radioactive nuclear waste, in the form of five volumes of reporting. So why the delay? The NRC says the Department of Energy has not met certain land and water rights requirements and that other environmental and regulatory hurdles remain.
A Wall Street Journal editorial on March 30 asserted that it is not about environmental and regulatory hurdles. It is about a deal that Nevada Senator Harry Reid, the former Senate Majority Leader, made with President Obama to keep Yucca Mountain from ever opening for use. In return, Reid blocked nearly all amendments to legislation to shield Obama from having to veto bills. He virtually nullified the Senate as a functioning element of our government.
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