Surprisingly, the Pahrump Valley Times has put forth an editorial supporting reopening Yucca Mountain to receive used nuclear rods from nuclear power plants.
From the PVT:: It’s almost as hard to believe that people in Las Vegas are still
willing to embrace that misbegotten nuclear glory of the 1950s, yet the
same crowd will shriek like little girls when it comes to discussing
Yucca Mountain.
Yucca is like a nuclear hot potato with nails
driven into it, each spike representing a different politician with a
different viewpoint as to what should be done with that big hole in the
mountain northwest of here.
To hear some people talk, the idea
behind Yucca is to pour every other state’s nuclear waste directly into
Las Vegas’ water supply. That isn’t the case.
The repository is
meant to be a permanent storage facility for spent nuclear fuel rods.
For all intents and purposes it is expected to be the safest way yet
discovered to dispose of such waste. Billions and billions of dollars
in taxpayer money has already been spent building this facility. States
from Washington to South Carolina to Illinois are growing more and more
impatient waiting for a place they’ve long been told will one day
alleviate their aging, cramped waste storage facilities. The licensing
process for Yucca — essentially the study to determine its true value
as a safe place to store waste — was booby trapped by our own
congressional delegation in Washington, D.C.
And now a trio of
federal judges is deciding whether the law mandating Yucca was violated
and whether the licensing process should be restarted.
We say yes
to Yucca, or at least yes to restarting the licensing process. The
thought of spending billions and billions of dollars on a hole in a
mountain and then not finishing the work required to determine whether
the darn thing is safe or not seems stupid.
Politics be damned. We
don’t care why Nevada was chosen over Texas or Washington or New Mexico
or anywhere else. Nevada is desolation defined and its history of
nuclear testing seems to make it ideal for what Yucca represents. If
it’s not safe, then that’s a different story. Prove it and we will be
the first to say, not in this backyard, buddy.
But what if it’s
perfectly safe? What if Yucca is really the missing ingredient in
Nevada’s potential evolution as the energy laboratory for the entire
country? What about the jobs and economic benefits?
Public safety
is certainly top priority, but what of meaningful economic
diversification — a future for Nevadans that isn’t hitched to tourism
and mining is a worthwhile goal. Yucca is the state’s best chance to
kick diversification into high gear, particularly since everything else
is suffering — education is dismal, housing is kaput, gaming is
treading water, medicine isn’t anything to brag about, et cetera, et
cetera. Thank God for the price of gold and for those boys in the silk
suits with offices on the Strip, otherwise a nuclear waste dump might
be the only reason to keep the state open for business.
In short,
we agree that Yucca’s licensing should be finished. We believe that the
debate about Yucca can’t even truly begin unless all parties can
equally weigh the merits of Yucca’s safety, or lack thereof, as
documented by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and its attendant
advisory boards. Without the licensing process complete, everything
else is just political talk and hand wringing.
The complicated
politics of it all is above us simple folks in Nye County. We don’t
care how Nevada figures into Obama’s re-election campaign, or what Sen.
Harry Reid promised years ago about killing Yucca dead.
All we know is that with Yucca, the potential economic benefits to Nye County glow brighter than an atomized Pacific atoll.
Without it, we just have another empty hole in a mountain to look at, albeit a very expensive hole.
http://pvtimes.com/news/editorial-board-obstacles-to-yucca-licensing-should-be-removed/
It is one of the more intelligent things to come out the PVT in some time and it puts forth an intelligent argument for Yucca Mountain. It certainly is better than many stupid politicians who think tourists will come to Las Vegas because of Yucca. And it is certainly smarter than anything old senile Coward Harry Reid has to say.
So, welcome PVT to the real world.
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