More Support For Yucca Mountain

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.