One of the most under-reported scandals of President Barrack Obama’s administration has been the way he colluded with Senator Harry Reid to illegally stop consideration of Nevada’s Yucca Mountain for storage of the nation’s nuclear waste. That prompted a lawsuit from Washington citizens, and now comes a study that shines further light on this travesty – as it turns out the Yucca Mountain site is the safe choice for long-term (as in one million years) storage of the nation’s waste.
As reported in the Tri-City Herald, “The proposed Yucca Mountain, Nev., nuclear repository would safely contain radioactive waste and used fuel long into the future, according to a long-awaited Nuclear Regulatory Commission safety report released Thursday.”
One would expect that the usual environmental suspects – from Jay Inslee to the Sierra Club to the Washington Conservation Voters – would be out today shouting from the (solar) rooftops, demanding action by the Obama administration, especially since much of that waste is currently stored at the Eastern Washington Hanford site.
Instead, we hear crickets.
Could that be because President Obama and Senator Reid are Democrats, and thus can do no wrong (especially this close to the election) in the eyes of the environmental movement?
Certainly seems like it, in the eyes of one of the Members of Congress who had been waiting on the report. “After a four-year delay, the public now has the benefit of the first independent safety assessment of Yucca Mountain, and can now have confidence that the repository would be in fact safe for a million years,” said Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
One of the Washington plaintiffs put it even more succinctly: “The findings in the report show that the halt to work ‘was politics over science.’”
Seems like something the environmentalists might want to think about, perhaps after the election.
Harry Reid putting politics over science? Naaaahhhhhhh.