User profile: Ardent

Again, do the math. Four-thousand acres of eyesore to generate a measly 242 megawatts under optimal conditions (i.e., no clouds or night). Contrast that with the nuclear plant 50 miles outside Phoenix: the Palo Verde station, which generates over 3,000 megawatts and occupies maybe a square mile. Moreover, the Palo Verde station is "always on," rather than intermittent like wind or solar.

Similarly, look into the risks created by solar power installations (an example of which one blogger mentions above); in particular, look at the environmental risks and the potential chemical consequences of "accidents" at solar installations. Beyond that, an economic comparison is worthwhile, too.

And yet, brainwashed Nevadans (except Nye County residents) reject all things nuclear (except, of course, the power it provides, which we import from other states) -- principal among them, the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain.

Even worse, however, are those who premise their anti-Yucca Mountain arguments on some poorly developed alternative energy fantasy. "We don't need nuclear (which goes double for Yucca Mountain); we have plenty of solar and wind. These will save our environment and get our local economy back on track!"

So saith the Greenies and their coincidental ally, Harry Reid. But anyone who has read the recent report put out by the independent Energy Information Administration (at the request of Reps. Markey and Waxman during development of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009) will soon discover that ALL forms of alternative energy, including nuclear, are necessary to get us to our emissions goals without ruinous economic consequences.

It also bears mentioning that many proposals to build new wind and solar plants have been withdrawn recently: due in part to a nervous financing climate, but mainly due to vocal opposition by the NIMBY crowd, who when confronted with a proposed nuclear facility screams bloody murder and says, "We should be building solar and wind," and then, when confronted with solar and wind, shouts "NIMBY!"

Funny how the same limited cast of characters always appears for these stories, myself included.

Birdiedreamin is little more than a condescending windbag who seems to equate snark with substance; he/she embodies the "apocalypse now" for rational political debate, which apparently has been reduced to name-calling and assertions without proof. It would be nice if such tactics could be dismissed without comment, but because they are of a piece with the breathtaking ignorance behind the recent healtcare town hall disruptions, one is left to wonder if reason has finally been vanquished by a kind of pridefully intentional stupidity or "magical thinking" or "faith-based worldview" of the sort that put Galileo in prison for insisting that the earth orbits the sun, rather than the other way around.

In any event, the false binary of "Republican versus Democrat" is equally tiresome. The Yucca Mountain Project has always enjoyed bipartisan majority votes in Congress, which the record clearly demonstrates to anyone who can be bothered to look at it. I happen to be a Democrat who supports the repository, and it is just as easy to find a (Nevada) Republican who opposes it. So leave off the silly argument by party affiliation.

Other points, for the record:

Future: You are right that NRC Staff only accepted 19 of the State's contentions. However, the NRC judges presiding over the hearings disagreed with the Staff's (and DOE's) evaluation and ended up admitting nearly all of Nevada's contentions. These will be adjudicated if NRC is allowed to do its job.

Finally, I find it especially depressing that Cortez-Masto's underling, Marta Adams, would say, "The NRC is not aware it's dead."

The NRC is an independent regulatory agency that is obligated to follow the law. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act (as davelv frequently reminds us) is the law of the land and requires NRC to evaluate the Yucca Mountain Project license application and either grant or deny a construction authorization -- based on the scientific, regulatory, and technical merits. End of story. (Unless, of course, you are Harry Reid and are willing to circumvent law through budget manipulation, like de-funding the NRC's statutorily mandated review.)

Robert Moen:

Your line of argument is familiar insofar as it defeats itself by its own logic.

Of course the Yucca Mountain Project is both a political and scientific decision (political in the broadest sense as "involving the polis"). The DOE's former director of the Project said as much, and everyone jumped on him for it.

Where your own logic falls apart is in cherry picking a couple of factors among hundreds and presenting them as somehow "definitive." Do you think you are the first person to offer the idea of WIPP as a potential high-level waste repository? Don't you think that's been studied? Do you know why WIPP is a transuranic waste repository rather than a high-level radioactive waste repository? Have you ever heard the term "salt creep"? Do you understand why NRC has no involvement in WIPP, but that NRC would by law be responsible for licensing any high-level waste/spent nuclear fuel repository? Do you know about the brine over which WIPP is sited, and the consequences of that? Do you have any earthly idea of the protests, legislative battles, and legal wrangling occasioned during the development of WIPP?

And on the geology/seismology/volcanology front: Why is it that people like you always throw out descriptive phrases like "most recently formed and changing crust on earth," and yet you never cite a single study about the probability of, say, an earthquake or volcanic eruption significant enough to cause damage?

Why is it that people from a particular discipline who oppose the repository always harp on only those elements of the repository design they understand? Yucca Mountain doesn't boil down to geology or seismology or any other single discipline. An alternate site that may seem perfect from the standpoint of a geologist will look like garbage from the standpoint of a hydrologist or an engineer. Hence, the many non-Project armchair geologists out there (e.g., Allison Macfarlane) who say, "The repository needs to be in granite, or in salt." Well, you find me a site in granite or salt that also satisfies the myriad other considerations, all specific to disciplines OTHER THAN geology, that go into siting a nuclear waste repository.

And even if you find the "perfect" site from a pan-disciplinary scientific standpoint, what about the legal and regulatory standpoint? Does your site meet requirements for distance from flightpaths and population concentrations? Is it near a water table that supplies a population center, as opposed to on top of one that dead ends in the middle of nowhere?

Before you start rejecting established law and policy and science, and before you make a proposal of your own, try looking at the entire picture. That's what the hundreds of scientists and engineers and regulatory experts did when narrowing down the initial nine potential sites to three and then to one: Yucca Mountain.

Okay, Lisa: Where's the story here?

As you mentioned, we knew from the Administration's 2010 budget, unveiled months ago, that the DOE's budget for Yucca Mountain would be around $196 million.

The bill you are describing (S. 1436), which has just emerged from the Senate Appropriations Committee, merely delivers what the Administration asked for. No surprise there. The allocation is $196 million.

DOE has already made the necessary workforce reductions to get through 2010 with a budget of $196 million. The current staffing level reflects that number. So where's the news, and how is the Yucca Mountain Project any more or less dead than it was months ago when the same sour-faced remarks issued from Our Dear Majority Leader's lips?

He looks like a man with a mouthful of fishmeat who's just discovered a bone in it.

The only real bit of news in your story, Lisa, concerns the NRC budget allocation, which does represent a departure from the Administration's FY2010 budget.

I find this the most newsworthy item to emerge from this week's cloud of idiocy and spin.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is supposed to be a non-partisan, independent regulatory agency. Its development, implementation, and enforcement of regulations is supposed to be BY STATUTE, without regard to politics (it's politics -- the legislative process -- that produces those statutes).

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 directs NRC to review the Yucca Mountain license application and either issue or deny a construction authorization license. This review is twofold: One part, conducted by NRC Staff, is technical; the other is legal, conducted by lawyers for the interested parties (Nevada, California, DOE, the nuclear industry, Native American tribes, etc.).

But now, Harry Reid is essentially proposing a CIRCUMVENTION OF THE LAW through budget cuts, which is what he's always done, only this time more flagrantly.

It's bad enough that former Reid science adviser Greg Jaczko has been elevated to the Chairman of the NRC, which represents the ultimate conflict of interest. But to then de-fund the NRC's legally mandated review, all with Jaczko's apparent blessing -- that's the limit indeed.

GM:

Here are some survey questions I would like to have seen in the poll-based study commissioned by Clark County:

(1) Do you find it troubling that policy makers would rely on a poll of 600 people to determine whether or not nuclear waste should be stored primarily in a remote, largely uninhabited location or should remain within 60 miles of over 160 million fellow Americans and near every major body of water in the country? (Note: Not a single one of the 160 million Americans who live within 60 miles of an existing nuclear facility was surveyed in the abovementioned poll.)

(2) Would you be willing, in exchange for rejecting a proposed nuclear waste repository in your state, to surrender that portion of your electricity generated by nuclear power? For example, in the state of Nevada, approximately 16% of electricity comes from nuclear power generated outside the state (for example, at the Palo Verde nuclear plant 40 miles outside of Phoenix, AZ). If you were a Nevadan, would you be willing to relinquish this portion of the electricity supply, whatever the consequences (i.e., in terms of shortages, brownouts, rate increases, etc.)?

(3) On what do you base your disapproval of the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain: (a) scientific evidence, (b) political convictions, (c) what I've heard from politicians and local media, (d) personal opinions with respect to nuclear energy.