Today’s WSJ front page notes Democrats Revolt Over Energy. Apart from the subsidies wasted on wind energy used to enrich Chinese manufacturers and the EPA proceeding to regulate the air we exhale, the Yucca Mountain closing is coming under fire.
Big utility operators as well as some states like South Carolina and Washington are blasting the Obama administrations announcement that it will drop plans for a federal nuclear-waste vault beneath Yucca Mountain.
“The Energy Department’s move to formally drop its application for the Yucca Mountain waste site could hobble efforts to build more nuclear power plants—a strategy the Obama administration has promoted as a way to reduce U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. Without a permanent solution to the waste-storage problem, several states, including California, won’t let new nuclear plants be built.”
“Michael Morris, chief executive of American Electric Power Co., said on Thursday that “there has to be a reaction,” because Yucca is the only site that’s been vetted and deemed capable of storing waste from the nation’s 104 operating power reactors. Speaking at a Wall Street Journal conference, he blasted the “idiocy of Yucca Mountain” being terminated as a repository, and said the government will have wasted $10 billion on the project if it doesn’t proceed.”
“Under federal law, Yucca is the designated site for the nation’s spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. But the repository is more than a decade behind schedule. As a result, the waste generally remains at the nuclear reactors and DOE sites where it was generated.”
But what’s a few billion dollars wasted, a significant number of jobs lost, and the pronouncement of conflicting federal policies to this consummate totalitarian? 2012 can’t come any too soon!
Tom Motherway