the race to yucca mountain

… has been cancelled on account of Presidential stupidity.
I am just going to echo Kevin’s sentiments concerning this heavily-biased news report:

The entire discussion was, of course, outlandishly hubristic. It was made necessary by the outlandishly severe and long-lasting environmental dangers posed by nuclear waste. Six decades after the dawn of the nuclear era, the only plausible answer to the question “What do we do with this stuff?” is “Don’t create any more of it.” That, in effect, is what President Obama is saying in fulfilling his campaign promise to shut down Yucca Mountain. The program, Obama’s new budget states, “will be scaled back to those costs necessary to answer inquiries from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission while the administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal.” That’s bureaucratese for “Yucca Mountain is dead.”

You have got to be kidding me… the only “plausible answer” is to turn off the systems that generate 16% of the world’s power, and 20% of America’s power?
And what, exactly, do you propose using by way of replacement for it? Because, something tells me that the 20% of our country that goes dark might have something to say about it.
Well, first off, even accounting for the higher initial costs of constructing a nuclear power plant versus a fossil fuel plant, nuclear power pretty soundly spanks fossil fuel power, especially if you are concerned about carbon emissions, ash containment ponds, and all the rest of that fun stuff. Yeah, nuclear power plants do have the nasty side-effect of having nuclear waste to store… but that is what Yucca Mountain was for, and I do not know about you, but a million year storage plan seems pretty sufficient to me.
When one compares nuclear power to “rewnewable” resources, like solar and wind, the data gets a little more creative, simply due to the plethora of erroneous studies and calculations on both sides of the fence. The main moral of the story, however, is both solar and wind power suffer from seasonal/intermittent production problems (the wind has to be blowing, or the sun has to be out), and the current half-life of both solar and wind production plants is significantly lower than the half-life of nuclear power. The cost comparisons between nuclear and solar/wind technologies are more or less washes, due to the number of subsidies on both sides of the fences, the geographical requirements for both (especially when you compare real estate investments), the muddled environmental impact of the various systems, and who performed the study. The biggest problem with solar and wind advocates these days is they use a lot of words like “could”, “can”, “will”, “planned”, and all the rest of that… Nuclear power provides consistent “does”, “is”, etc.
As for the American public’s irrational inability to accept nuclear power… do not even get me started. The facts are that nuclear power is safer than coal, natural gas, and hydroelectric power, and has only suffered two major failures in over 12,700 cumulative reactor-years of commercial operation (not even counting the numerous nuclear reactors operated by multiple militaries with few-to-no incidents (depending on the country)) in 32 countries. Of those two major failures, one (Three Mile Island) did not result in any significant release of radiation or radioactive material (estimates put the radiation exposure from this incident, outside of the containment building, to be 1/6th the amount of radiation you receive from an x-ray), and the other (Chernobyl) was directly caused by design deficiencies, operational procedure violations, and a lack of attention to safey, all of which have been corrected in reactors built since. Even if you broaden the definition of “major accident” to include just about any accident, the count only goes up to 17.
*sigh* I am not even a nuke, and I still boggle at people’s inability to accept proven technology that works, works now, works affordably, and works safely. No, it is not perfect, but neither is solar or wind. Yes, it has some nasty byproducts, but, for God’s sake, sticking it in the Earth is putting it back where we found it.
And here we go, down a path where our glorious President has just signed a death warrant for every active nuclear reactor in America. What is that, you say? He just killed some stupid pork-barrel project, you say? Not quite. Because, for the past 50 years, all the reactors in America have been making the waste that was going to go into Yucca Mountain, and they have been storing it locally, either in big ol’ storage pools, or in containment casks. The problem is simple: storage space is running out. And when that storage space does run out, thanks to the actions of our new President, the reactors are going to have to shut down… and something tells me we will not have planned far enough ahead to account for the 20% of the country that will go dark.
That is one in five states. Does yours have a reactor in it?
(As a random mental exercise, this request was posed to me by an opponent of the Yucca Mountain plan: design/devise a “do not enter, this is a really bad place” sign/icon/indicator/warning that would be comprehensible 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, and/or 1,000,000 years in the future.)