Senate Passes Bill to Close Yucca Mountain

(AP)  The Senate on Wednesday passed a $34.3 billion energy spending bill that backs up President Barack Obama's promise to close a nuclear waste facility in the southwestern state of Nevada.

The bill, passed by a 85-9 vote, also covers hundreds of water projects being undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The Yucca Mountain project 90 miles (145 kilometres) from Las Vegas was designed to hold 77,000 tons of waste, but has been strongly opposed by the Nevada delegation, which had been outgunned in its efforts to kill it.

The move fulfills a campaign promise by Obama to close Yucca Mountain, which was 25 years and $13.5 billion in the making. It would, however, leave the country without a long-term solution for storing highly radioactive waste from nuclear power plants.

The waste disposal problem has become worse since the federal government scrapped plans to open Yucca Mountain. Instead, radioactive fuel rods are now stored in large concrete and steel canisters on the grounds of nuclear plants around the country.

The 1987 law requiring waste to be stored at Yucca Mountain remains on the books, however, so the project could in theory be revived.

The Yucca Mountain project would still receive the $196.8 million budgeted by Obama for work on the site - and to keep several hundred employees working - though the money won't go to ship waste there.

The House of Representatives earlier this month passed its own $33.3 billion measure covering energy programs and water projects that also contained the Yucca Mountain provision.

The two bills now go to a House-Senate conference committee to work out differences before a final bill can be sent to the president.

The Senate also adopted an amendment by California Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer to allow for water transfers to help farmers in California's Central Valley suffering from severe drought conditions.

The underlying bipartisan measure has money for a wide variety of programs, including clean energy research, and has more than 600 so-called earmarks for lawmakers, mostly for Army Corps of Engineers projects.

[proudmilvet]

They Should Keep Yucca Mountain Open & Close Down The Senate! No Nuclear Waste There, But Lot's Of Human Waste!!

[ludvig1-2009]

Where do I go to reregister as a Republican. I'm not a Democrat anymore.

[hungry1968-16]

Go Independent. It's the only way to fly.

[iam4honesty]

Heck, just paste some dollar bills to it and set it out somewhere. Cheney will grab it and run off to an undisclosed location.

2 birds with one stone.

[aldon61]

I know people from Las Vegas; they maintain that most all of the population in that area DO NOT want the waste stored at Yucca Mountain. I also agree with sjc_1 that it's too dangerous to be transfering radio active material across our nation's highways. We're just courting a disaster. Store it on site.

[sjc_1]

The problem with a central repository is that you need to transport all that dangerous waste across the country by rail and truck. I would rather store it on sight and secure it there. It is a shame that they wasted all that money on this boondoggle.

[afmcalax]

Stupid, stupid, stupid. This was one campaign promise that Obama should rethink. We need nuclear energy as one of the alternatives to energy production. We also need a centralized place to store it. I would then like to see funds approved to create a process that would could render the radioactive material inert. That would be a useful project to put our top scientists on.

[doctor_know]

Wrong! The thing that was stupid stupid stupid was dumping all that cash into the Yucca mountain project in the first place. We scientists have known for a long time now that the Yucca site is not sound enough to store the nations nuclear waste, but politicians insisted on keeping the project moving forward... the project should have been scrapped 10 years ago!

I agree that nuclear must be part of the short term solution to our energy problems, and that alternatives to Yucca mountain should be pursued.

[jasperrdm]

Okay dr know,
Where should put the waste? Or how do we process it to make it safe?