Up and Atom!

True story: my senior thesis at college was “Ceramic Nuclear Fuels” and part of the project was a contemporary review of the technology. At the time (1991) I postulated that the nuclear energy industry would experience a resurrection of sorts because the dual effects of spiraling fossil fuel prices and a resurgence in the environmental movement. To this latter point, I noted that the only waste caused by nuclear energy is spent radioactive material that could be reliably contained at the repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

I noted in the report that nuclear waste would be active for 10,000 years but that Yucca sees so little rainfall that any water passing by the buried radioactive containers would not reach the water table for 9,000 years. My professor wrote in the margin: “What about the other 1,000 years?”

Um…we’ll all be living on the moon? Even the uber-leftist New York Times couldn’t furrow its brow at this far-out concern:

A federal appeals court decision has thrown a gigantic roadblock in the way of efforts to create an underground burial site for nuclear wastes at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. A three-judge panel in the District of Columbia ruled last month that regulators could not simply require the repository to contain the wastes for 10,000 years, the standard set by the Environmental Protection Agency, but must instead ensure that Yucca could function acceptably for hundreds of thousands of years. That standard is so outlandishly stringent it may not be achievable.

If atomic energy were more readily available, America could reduce its dependence on coal-fired electricity generation, which accounts for the vast majority of electricity sources (nuclear and natural gas are a distant second and third). Oh but we hates that nuclear energy and we loves Nevada’s five electoral votes:

Congress will no doubt be reluctant to tackle the issue in an election year, especially since Senator John Kerry and other Democratic leaders, pandering shamelessly for the electoral votes of the battleground state of Nevada, have pledged to block Yucca.

Holy cow, the NY Times said that? Are they also in cahoots with the Bush campaign? As Howard Dean would say: the timing is suspicious.