Word: yucca
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...Since 1987, Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert has been the only permanent repository the Department of Energy has considered to store the toxic garbage for at least the next 10,000 years. But Nevada's congressional delegation, led by the Senate's powerful majority whip, Harry Reid, has been fighting tooth and nail to keep the underground nuclear dump out of their state. Yucca Mountain is just 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas and they fear radioactivity from an underground storage facility there would eventually leak, contaminating nearby ground water used for drinking...
...Late last week, Reid launched what amounted to a B-52 attack in his long-running legislative war to block the building of the Yucca repository. He released the results of a General Accounting Office report (that he and Nevada Congresswoman Shelley Berkley commissioned) which concluded that the Energy Department can't stick to its timetable of recommending early next year that the Yucca site should be built "because it doesn't have all of the technical information needed for a recommendation and a subsequent license application." That's bad news considering that the Energy Department so far has spent...
...report, however, has even more pessimistic conclusions that have Reid cheering. The Energy Department has projected that the Yucca Mountain repository will end up costing $57.5 billion and it wants to finish the project by 2010. But the GAO report predicts that the Energy Department not only won't meet those goals but that it also "has no reliable estimate of when, and at what cost, such a repository could be opened." Getting the repository up and running by 2013 is even "questionable," the GAO concludes...
...delicious irony, Reid--who is chairman of the Appropriations Committee's energy and water development subcommittee--now controls Yucca's purse strings. That means Yucca will be examined with a microscope to "make sure they can justify every penny," Reid says. He plans to shift money into studies of alternatives to the Yucca repository, such as storing the nuclear waste in concrete "dry casks" at the power plants where the waste is generated...
With polls showing as many as 80% of Nevadans opposed to the project, however, bargaining would be political suicide. Before he makes any deal to take nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Reid says, he'll be "on top of the Capitol doing a full body dive." That's a performance the nuclear industry would pay admission...