Posted on 04/09/2002 11:11:28 AM PDT by cogitator
Nevada Governor Vetoes Yucca Mountain
LAS VEGAS, Nevada, April 8, 2002 (ENS) - Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn has vetoed the Bush administration's recommendation to build a permanent repository for radioactive wastes at Yucca Mountain.
"Let me make one thing crystal clear - Yucca Mountain is not inevitable, and Yucca Mountain is no bargaining chip," Guinn said Monday morning in an address at the University of Nevada. "And, so long as I am governor, it will never become one."
"Yucca Mountain is not safe, it is not suitable," Guinn continued, "and we will expose the Department of Energy's dirty little secrets about Yucca Mountain."
Guinn traveled to Washington DC today to file his official Notice of Disapproval, also known as a Governor's Veto, with both houses of Congress. In 1982, Nevada was given the unequivocal right to veto the president's recommendation that Yucca Mountain become the nation's sole repository for high level nuclear wastes - the first time a state been given the power to veto a presidential decision.
Congress will have 90 legislative days to override Guinn's veto on a simple majority vote.
"This veto belongs to each and every one of you who have battled against a project that would be detrimental to the public health and safety of our citizens, our precious natural resources and our economy," Guinn said, "and to the other 43 states and hundreds of cities and towns in America through which this dangerous waste will be transported."
In 1987, Congress selected Yucca Mountain as the only site it would study for disposal of high level nuclear wastes, the most dangerous of radioactive wastes. Guinn argued that Yucca Mountain was selected because it is located in a section of Nevada with a population of less than one million, and just four legislative representatives.
But its isolation means that Yucca Mountain is thousands of miles away from 90 percent of the nation's 110 nuclear power plants, requiring the wastes to be transported across country, passing through populated areas along the way. The Department of Energy (DOE) plans to use Yucca Mountain for the disposal of 77,000 tons of high level radioactive waste and spent fuel from throughout the United States and 42 countries.
"The fact that the Yucca Mountain decision was made without any analysis of the transportation risks to the 123 million Americans in states through which this dangerous waste will travel is the dirty little secret," Guinn said.
Citing more than $100 million the nuclear power industry has spent to promote the project, Guinn asked all Nevadans to contribute at least $1 to the Nevada Protection Fund, which has now topped $6 million.
I've done work there, once on site, that waste won't go anywhere.
I've been in those tunnels, too. Short of a magnitude 15 earthquake (that would probably fracture the Earth anyway) that diverts the entire volumetric flow of the Colorado River through the fragmented remains of the storage casks, that stuff is staying put.
I helped with some of the early studies of fission product transport through those rock strata. We're talking about migration rates measured in microns per geologic epoch. My guess is that the material will get out someday - when the Sun swells to nova size and melts the crust of the earth away.
How much of the uranium was mined in Nevada in the firat place?
I'm for ANWR drilling and I'm probably for the Yucca repository. But I care one hell of a lot more about the Yucca risk than I do about the Caribou in Alaska. You will see that the liberals don't. Neither ANWR or Yucca is in their states, but Yucca could affect their states' populations. They do not care about American people.
Bump for later.
Well, you're right about one thing, the libs don't care about the energy security of this country. Here we have the Arabs about to turn off the spigot over the turmoil in the Middle East and even that won't sway the opposition of the Rat libs to the ANWR development proposals. They'd just as soon have us all riding Shank's Mare and a collapsed economy before they'd consider exploitation of proven, reliable, domestic energy resources, except for unworkable, wacko "alternative" source that won't reliably power your crapper on a cloudy, calm day.
If the fuel were reprocessed, the volume of the waste would be significantly reduced, we would have enough fuel to power nuclear reactors until the sun burned out with proper reactor design, and the remaining small volume of waste would decay to background levels in only a few hundred years.
Er. Not just no, He|| no. Nuclear waste == Raw material for A-bombs. Think before you post please.
Couple billion?
In fact, there is no safe place on this earth to put all that radioactive garbage. Worse yet, as the Governor has pointed out, there is a significant hazard involved in transporting it to any site. However, now that the problem is upon us, the transportation problem is a given, one we have no choice but to deal with. The storage problem, on the other hand, is one we don't have to deal with.
Why not put NASA to work doing something useful? Why not package the stuff up and shoot it into the sun?
One Challenger-type accident and then you've made the entire east coast of Florida uninhabitable for centuries.
(Did I make that sound like it was a bad thing?)
Actually, we're talking about the Republican governor of a conservative state.
It was govt mandated and is common sense. Bet it's still staffed by nephews.
Apparently you have not been following this process. Congress decided a dozen years ago that Yucca Mounain would be the only site considered. Then it ordered the Energy Dept. to prepare studies justifying that decision. And in fact so many studies indicated that Yucca is not a geologically stable as they had hoped that they had to design a storage container that would keep the fuel safe regardless of geological conditions. Which means, as some posters have pointed out, that the waste could be stored anywhere.
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