Tag: yucca mountain

Yucca Mountain will open for business, probably by 2018 or 2019.

There’s a reason for that prediction.

States with nuclear power plants have eyed Yucca Mountain since the late 1980s as a place to bury spent but still highly radioactive fuel rods. No state offered to host a repository, so Congress shoved it down Nevada’s throat when we didn’t have the political means to fend off the bullies.

…Translation: “Harry Reid said no.” Guess who won’t be running a danged thing in 2017? …That’s right! The next Senate Minority Leader isn’t going to be a Nevadan – Nevada may not even have any Democratic Senators in 2017 – and that’s pretty much the only thing keeping Nevada from storing the waste at this point. And if you don’t think that American Senators – on both sides – are petty enough to put a thumb in Reid’s other eye once he’s safely out of the Senate, well, I applaud your righteous nature.

Hey, you win some; you lose some.

#rsrh You know, anybody who Harry Reid hates this badly (and PROFANELY)…

…can’t be all that bad.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, the Nevada Democrat savaged Bill Magwood, a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, when asked if he thought the Democrat had a chance to become NRC chairman.

“You know, when you’re in this government, this business of politics, the only thing that you have is your word,” said Reid, seated in his Capitol office. “I can be as partisan as I have to be, but I always try to be nice. I try never to say bad things about people. Bill Magwood is one of the” — Reid paused, deciding which adjective to reach for, before picking them all — “most unethical, prevaricating” — he paused again, this time for 10 full seconds — “incompetent people I’ve ever dealt with. The man sat in that chair — right there — and lied to me. I’ve never, ever in my life had anyone do that. Never.”

Actually, Reid, people lie to you all the time.  It’s just that usually you don’t catch them doing it to you.

Read the rest, even if it’s HuffPo: Reid completely loses his professionalism and dignity as a Senator in this one.  It’s funny! Particularly when he starts swearing.

Daily Caller: was Yucca Mountain shutdown lawful?

The DC has the scoop*: Congress is now investigating whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) actually had the authority to unilaterally shut down the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage facility without Congressional authorization, given that Yucca Mountain was authorized under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.  Furthermore, there are now serious questions about whether the NRC’s leadership – and, by extension, the Obama administration – is ignoring the actual science of the situation in favor of petty and crasss partisan politics.

This is the key paragraph, I think: it describes the background to the sudden quashing in November 2010 of a safety report on the facility.

Dr. Janet Kotra, the deputy office director responsible for drafting the [Yucca Mountain] safety evaluation, known as the Safety Evaluation Report (SER), wrote in an internal memo that [NRC Chair {and Reid crony} Gregory] Jaczko unilaterally instructed his staff to “move to orderly closure of NRC’s Yucca Mountain program.” This is despite the fact the Nuclear Waste Policy Act remains in effect and the full commission has yet to rule on whether the Department of Energy can legally withdraw the license application.

Continue reading Daily Caller: was Yucca Mountain shutdown lawful?

What the ban on Yucca Mountain reminds us.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

I do like what Francis wrote, but I want to really drive it home to my people – which is to say, science fiction geeks. Let me strip this down for you. There was a quote that Jerry Pournelle likes to repeat, from one of the anti-nuclear power people: “The only physics I ever took was Ex-Lax.“ Remember that one? Remember how it made you laugh at the idiot?

Well, did you vote for Obama? – because if you did, you voted for the guy who takes people like that idiot seriously.

And, do you know something? I told you so.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.