Yucca Mountain: did politics trump science?

For more than 50 years, the debate has raged over where to store radioactive nuclear waste in this country. The solution was supposed to be at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. But the multi-billion storage project has been shelved. CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian reports a congressional committee wants to find out why.

Is there nuclear waste in your state?

Nuclear waste is the radioactive guest on the doorstep of many of America's most populous cities. There are nearly 70,000 tons from 104 reactors nationwide, often piling up just 50 miles from cities like New York, Chicago, and San Diego.

In the high desert of Nevada, Yucca Mountain was one site designed to store all of our nation's waste. But today, the government won't let CBS News cameras anyone near the site. It's shut down, locked up, and caught up in what critics charge was nothing more than pure politics.

Gary Hollis and Darrell Lacey are key officials in Nye County, Nevada. They want the waste - for the jobs and money it would bring.

Lacy, director of community development, said, "the people in this area are all fairly comfortable with Yucca Mountain. Many of them have worked at Yucca Mountain."

Four previous presidents funded safety reviews of the project. But last year, the Obama administration kept its campaign promise and shut down Yucca Mountain.

Now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) must decide if it wants to re-start what is already a 25-year, $14 billion project - in the face of tough opposition - like that from Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate Majority leader from Nevada.

Nuclear safety expert Jeffrey Lewis said, "if the U.S. government wanted to do Yucca Mountain, it would have to shove it down Harry Reid's throat."

A former staffer for Sen. Reid, Greg Jaczko now chairs the NRC. Jaczko recently came under fire after shutting down the agency's safety review of Yucca Mountain and after key safety recommendations were redacted -- cut out -- from a long-awaited NRC report.

Three NRC staffers formally protested the decision to "derail" the safety review - charging it caused "confusion, chaos and anguish..."

Today, Yaczko told us the safety report was "preliminary, a draft" and that he had nothing to do with the redactions.

Responding to critics who charge that he was simply doing the bidding of his former boss, Sen. Reid, Jaczko said, "it was a difficult decision because it is such a controversial program but it is one that was made in I believe the best interests of the agency."

The NRC Inspector General and Congress are now investigating the decision to shut down the safety review. Still nuclear waste is scattered across 35 states while Yucca Mountain sits silent, and empty.

[ehingerce]

"Burying nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain is the same as planting time bombs there."

OK "time bomb" Set to go off in a MILLION YEARS, Lets see that would be 1,002,011 AD or in other words your great great to the 15413 generation grandson or granddaughter, who might just have enough time to figure out, which wire to cut, "the red or the blue one?" HUMMM. " OMG they can only keep it safe for ten thousand years and not a million? Can't have that here." Meanwhile what happens to the waste fuel from San Onofre or Diablo Canyon when California falls into the ocean in 50 years? What will you great grandchildren say then?

[Impeach_Harry_Reid]

The Yucca Mountain Repository needs to happen and it will happen...
I am hoping that the numerous lawsuits and investigations will shed some much needed daylight on manipulations going on here!

NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko has taken the non-political and independent agancy, and politicized it to do Harry Reid's bidding. Jaczko is destroying the NRC's reputation and credibility as a non-partisan regulator.

Harry Reid has been pulling the strings behind this plot to stop Yucca Mountain for many years. Recall that Reid forced Jaczko onto the Commission through the hold-up of ~100 Bush appointees until he caved. Then, once Obama was elected, Reid forced the appointment of Jaczko as the Chairman of the NRC. Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, was one of the nine National Laboratory heads that supported Yucca Mountain just months before flip-flopping and selling his soul to be appointed the new position in the administration.

Nevadans wanted the project until Dirty Harry beat the scare tactics into the big cities of Las Vegas and Reno... Ask Nye County and they'll tell you to give them the project, the jobs, and the money that comes with it...

[treewomyn]

No one has mentioned the fault lines that run all through that area. I guess it's easier to pretend that they don't exist and that something like what happened in Japan would never happen here. Wake up people! Burying nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain is the same as planting time bombs there.

[ehingerce]

"There is an alternative to Uranium fueled nuclear power."

That may be true BUT!!! What about the spent fuel, ETC that is here NOW? We have the capability to store this stuff in a SAFE place. Where? Yucca Mt.
I'm happy that all this research is going into alternative power BUT what about NOW? What does the U.S. need to get us off our P/C keysters, a Japan type disaster? PUT the stuff in the ground where it came from. Oh and don't tell me "IT IS MANMADE" There is a big ball of molten C--P about 500 miles under your feet that says differently.
"OMG it's not been proven SAFE for a million years" Get real people. A Million Years?

[ibsteve2u]

Have to do something with the waste...not doing anything while you permit the amounts scattered around the country to grow and grow and grow like particularly lethal and delicate batches of nitroglycerin waiting for the stagecoach that is the planet's mantle to hit an unusually sharp bump is both the height of irresponsibility and dereliction of duty.

[loginos]

Politics is not about the best interests of the country. It is about taking an opposite position from the other side. The grand plan is to demagouge the issue with each party spending billions along the way. Consider any issue, and the politicians and lawyers eat every tax dollar they can extract from the American public.

[jkle123]

I will trade you Yucca Mountain for oh let's say . . . . . . a Cowboy Poetry Festival.

[ppaulville]

Harry Reid is a tool.

[ehingerce]

" But the multi-billion storage project has been shelved...congressional committee wants to find out why."

I guess we elect to congress men and women who don't follow the news. Here they go wasting taxpayers money on a hearings, etc., when all they have to do is read newspaper articles from a couple of years ago.

Of course it was politics, "OMG they can't ensure that it would stay safe for a million years." Let me ask this - in a hundred years are any of us going to care? Not unless they find the fountain of youth soon.

[sjc_1]

Transporting more than 60,000 tons of spent fuel rods across the country to Nevada would take decades. Any one day of that time terrorists could hijack a load, make a dirty bomb and render a U.S. city uninhabitable. Be careful what you wish for.