Tuesday, March 17, 2009 | 12:18 p.m.
WASHINGTON -- Arizona Sen. John McCain continues to stake his claim as the go-to supporter of nuclear energy and Yucca Mountain.
At a Senate energy hearing today, McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate, grilled Interior Secretary Ken Salazar about including nuclear power as part of the renewable energy equation.
President Barack Obama supports nuclear power, but has proposed significantly scaling back funding for the nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in the upcoming fiscal 2010 budget. Congress has consistently reduced funds to study the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, a technology some see as an alternative to storage but others dismiss as decades from fruition.
“You can’t develop nuclear power and energy in this country if you don’t reprocess and you do not use Yucca Mountain as a repository for spent nuclear fuel,” McCain said told the secretary.
“They basically killed nuclear power for the foreseeable future in this country,” McCain said. “I see no way of achieving energy independence….that nuclear power can’t be part of the equation.”
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