Thought experiment: which makes more sense from a safety and security perspective for the storage of highly radioactive, poisonous nuclear waste? First choice: centralized storage of all nuclear wastes at a well-designed and geologically isolated underground facility (Yucca mountain). Second choice: over 120 “temporary” storage sites, not geologically isolated, many within a few miles of urban areas.
From a security point of view, it’s no contest: those dispersed temporary storage sites are dirty bomb incidents just waiting to happen. Safety? would you think that anything, let alone nuclear waste, was safer stored inside a mountain in the Nevada desert, or just up the Hudson, say, from New York City? Hmmm, give me a minute…
There’s another perspective, and that is energy independence. If we are ever going to get serious about cutting the umbilical cord from the Middle East, we’re going to have to develop, and to the max, all viable alternative forms of energy. And nuclear power is one such viable source that has been in hibernation due to two principal causes.
The first cause is the anti-nuclear hysteria, snake oil peddled by so-called environmentalists over the past 30 years (since the incident at Three Mile Island that injured not one single human). Nuclear power is safer than coal (much, much safer), and, cleaner. Now that global warming has become the watchword (instead of the dreaded nuclear winter…), even some enviros have discovered that nuclear power does not add carbon to the atmosphere.
But there remains that pesky problem of nuclear waste. It accumulates; it’s hazardous. And one argument against nuclear power has been the lack of a permanent storage solution for that waste. Kind of self-reinforcing argument for the live-in-a-cave crowd: can’t have nuclear power because there’s no storage; can’t have storage because it hasn’t been proven to be pristinely safe for all eternity.
The federal government has spent billions on studying and preparing Yucca Mountain since 1978, and it has become an article of faith among liberals that it should not be opened. The best one can say about the almost uniform opposition among prominent Democrats is that they are sincerely worried that our environment might be harmed.
More likely is the classic liberal NIMBYism, and opposition to nuclear power as an article of faith. Virtually all of the Donk candidates are in favor of energy independence, or at least they mouth those words. Yet it has become a debating point between Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton when one accused the other of not having sufficient zeal in their opposition to Yucca Mountain. From the WaPo, here’s what Obama said:
When Senator Clinton implied that I’m for Yucca when I’ve never been for it, that’s a problem. That erodes people’s confidence in our politics.
Fascinating. Being in favor of a permanent solution which has been pretty much studied to death for 30 years is, somehow, used as a point of attack by the Democrats. Not that Obama, or Clinton, are in favor of doing anything that might actually help in the goal of reducing our dependence on foreign oil.
Democrats, at least those now likely to get their party’s nomination, are stuck in the unthinking radicalism of their (mutual) Saul Alinsky days. They’re against something because that’s what they’ve always been against.
“When Senator Clinton implied that I’m for Yucca when I’ve never been for it, that’s a problem.” No, Barack. The problem is that you, and she, are unwilling to think outside your own radical box.
