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United States Politics

How Yucca Mountain Was Killed 340

ATKeiper writes "The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which was selected by the U.S. government in the 1980s to be the nation's permanent facility for storing nuclear waste, is essentially dead. A new article in The New Atlantis explains how the project was killed: 'In the end, the Obama administration succeeded, by a combination of legal authority and bureaucratic will, in blocking Congress's plan for the Yucca Mountain repository — certainly for the foreseeable future, and perhaps permanently.... The saga of Yucca Mountain's creation and apparent demise, and of the seeming inability of the courts to prevent the Obama administration from unilaterally nullifying the decades-old statutory framework for Yucca, illustrates how energy infrastructure is uniquely subject to the control of the executive branch, and so to the influence of presidential politics.' A report from the Government Accountability Office notes that the termination 'essentially restarts a time-consuming and costly process [that] has already cost nearly $15 billion through 2009.'"
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How Yucca Mountain Was Killed

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  • by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Thursday December 06, 2012 @06:35PM (#42209693) Homepage Journal

    That's the biggest problems with shifts in power, especially if parties change every four years. One party spends four years getting something in place, or sets some long term goals, and then next election someone else comes in and changes it all. So they spend all the time and money getting one thing spun up and then it gets canned and they spend the next four years doing something else and it may be canned.

    Gotta be a better way.

    Democracy is the worst method of government, except for all the alternatives.

  • by Culture20 ( 968837 ) on Thursday December 06, 2012 @07:14PM (#42210107)
    Then we'll have to make nice with Pyongyang for their Unicorn Lair.
  • by kelemvor4 ( 1980226 ) on Thursday December 06, 2012 @07:17PM (#42210131)

    Pretty much, yeah. When you're one of the big guys in the prez' coterie, you get what you want, and Reid (D, NV) got what he wanted. ...of course, we still have to figure out where to put all the $#@%^! nuclear waste, but you know, at least Reid got what he wanted.

    I propose we bury it in LA County, specifically Hollywood - earthquakes be damned.

    The combination of the new nuclear waste and the human waste already stored there could form a singularity.

  • by radtea ( 464814 ) on Thursday December 06, 2012 @07:41PM (#42210349)

    Wind doesn't kill loads of migrating birds

    The Committee for Supporting the Ridiculous Kabuki Theatre that Passes for Environmental Policy Discussion would like to extend its gratitude to you for stepping up and posting the mandated reply to the inevitable idiot who comments that "windmills kill birds" twenty years after the major changes to windmill design substantially mitigated the problem.

    The Committee estimates that there are still roughly 3.2 billion idiots on Earth who have not updated their beliefs from the 1980s, and appreciate that while the task of replying to every single one of these unmitigated morons is arduous, tireless volunteers like yourself will eventually have replied to each and every one of them at least once by 2075.

    By that time, it is estimated that the average idiot will have been corrected at least 5 times, and that perhaps as many as 1% of them will have updated their beliefs in light of reality. While this number may seem disappointingly small in fractional terms, remember: it is still upwards of 30 million human beings whose tiny little minds have been changed by pointing out just how stupid they look when repeating falsehoods from several decades past.

    Keep up the good work!

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