Sean Whaley reports that Rep. Dina Titus has criticized a new effort in Congress to move the project forward just as a state-legislative panel overseeing the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository gets ready to meet later this week.
Titus, D-Nev., spoke out against a plan to fund the project in the Fiscal 2017 Energy-Water Appropriations bill, HR 5055. The provision would allot the U.S. DoE $150 million to continue an application process to license the project as a nuclear storage facility. The legislation also prohibits any funds from being used to close Yucca Mountain as a future storage option.
Titus has sponsored the Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act, which would require projects such as Yucca Mountain to receive approval from local governments in affected areas (which over the past years all county commissioners have approved Yucca Mt.).
Yucca Mountain is not a secure depository that would seal dangerous waste safely for a million years, Titus has said, (which is not true on many levels. The geoscience is good).
It is instead a proposal based on bad science and faulty assumptions (here are more wildly false claims). Specifically, the NRC confirmed that it is not secure (which it did not), that it will leak (which it did not), and that radiation will travel miles through underground water sources to farming communities in the Amargosa Valley on its way to Death Valley National Park (Not).
The waste will also have to be transported across the U.S. to the site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The Obama administration in 2010 shelved the controversial project, which faced opposition from many Nevada political leaders and citizens, but efforts to revive it continue.
U.S. Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., sent a letter to the House Appropriations subcommittee members asking that the Titus provision be removed from the legislation, and add $20 million for the NRC to advance the Yucca Mountain license application.
Read on, but watch the adjectives used.
Resource Portal for I2M Clients, Associates, and Geoscientists
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-