Reid plays his cards right, U.S. loses on Yucca Mountain

Reid plays his cards right, U.S. loses on Yucca Mountain

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has gotten his wish. Nevada has an $8 billion hole in the southern Nevada desert, paid for by electricity customers across the country who have been saddled with surcharges on nuclear power. President Barack Obama made good on a campaign promise to Reid and halted spending on the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository project.

It’s a project that has been under study for 30 years and under construction for about half that — and if not for the unfortunate confluence of events that put Reid in charge of the Senate and Obama in the White House, Yucca Mountain would still be the long range answer to the nation’s nuclear waste problem.

Obama not only cut the project from his budget, but Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a Senate hearing last week that “the Yucca Mountain site no longer was viewed as an option for storing reactor waste.”

Just like that, a project that has been on the drawing board for a generation is no longer an option. The audacity of the action is almost unbelievable.

Congress took responsibility

Yucca Mountain has always been a subject of contention, and the reluctance of Nevadans to welcome a nuclear waste facility serving the rest of the nation is understandable. But one thing that hasn’t changed is that something has to be done with the waste accumulating at nuclear power plants. The federal government took ownership of the problem in 1982, with the passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Congress recognized that nuclear waste wasn’t going away on its own and that the potential for catastrophe was too great to leave enormous amounts of waste at scattered sites around the country. Congress not only charged the Department of Energy with coming up with a solution, it began charging electricity customers to finance the project.

Now, a exultant Reid declares victory at the apparent death of the project. “President Obama recognizes that the proposed dump threatens the health and safety of Nevadans and millions of Americans. His commitment to stop this terrible project could not be clearer,” Reid said.

Only a politician of Reid’s stature could dismiss a complex that already cost $8 billion and would cost billions more before it was finished as a “dump.” Five miles of deep underground tunnels, elaborate safeguards, scientific laboratories and state-of-the art encapsulation for containers holding radioactive waste is a bit more than a dump.

And while we understand that it is Reid’s primary job as Nevada’s senator to worry about Nevadans, what about more than 100 million Americans living in proximity to the temporary holding facilities for nuclear waste? As majority leader of the Senate, doesn’t he have a responsibility to all Americans? The irony, of course, is that if his Democratic colleagues hadn’t made him their leader, he wouldn’t have had the juice to kill the project. It’s too bad they couldn’t see that he was using the power they had given him to undercut the best interest of their constituents.

Monumental problem

The United States is already sitting on more than 56,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and 20,000 canisters of solid defense-related waste that was destined for storage at Yucca Mountain. As it was, it was unlikely that any of that waste would have been shipped to Nevada before 2020. By the time a new project is developed, there’s likely to be twice as much nuclear waste that will have to be protected and stored somewhere. And if Nevada, heretofore famous for casinos and legal brothels, thinks its back yard is too good for a nuclear waste facility, what state is going to step up and say, “Put it here, please”?

Obama, Reid and anyone else who thinks that the smart thing to do is leave nuclear waste scattered around the country (there are three sites in Ohio, eight in Pennsylvania), are kidding themselves. Every industrialized nation on earth is working on a plan to safely encapsulate its nuclear waste. Almost all see a geologic repository as the ultimate answer. It’s a safe bet that any European nation would love to have a site half as isolated and half as secure as Yucca Mountain.

This was a short-sighted action driven by power politics, and Obama’s willingness to fold to the gentleman from Nevada is not a good sign.