Reid Victory Means No Progress on Yucca Mt.
The Daily Beast reports:
Majority Leader Harry Reid beat GOP challenger Sharron Angle on Tuesday, helping assure Democratic control of the Senate for the next two years. Unfortunately for U.S. taxpayers, Reid's victory comes with a $40 billion bill—all of it related to his dogged opposition to storing nuclear waste in Nevada.
Last year, the Obama administration—bowing to pressure from the Nevada pol—decimated funding for the nuclear waste disposal site at Yucca Mountain and said officials would begin looking for other sites to take the waste.
But by abandoning the Yucca Mountain project, Obama has assured that taxpayers will be billed for the storage and disposal of America's nuclear waste three times.
The original, and biggest bill (so far) for the disposal of U.S. nuclear waste comes from the Yucca Mountain project itself, one of the longest-running federal works programs in U.S. history. Over the past three decades, the government has spent about $13.5 billion of taxpayers money researching and developing the site at Yucca Mountain. The site, which is ready for use and only awaits licensing from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, could store the 70,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel that is now spread among 80 locations in 35 states. Reid's NIMBY posturing makes for handy politics in Nevada, but it mocks a two-decade-old federal law which requires the federal government to take possession of the high-level waste produced by the country's nuclear power plants.
The second bill to taxpayers for Reid's obstructionism stems from lawsuits from electric utilities who are successfully suing the federal government for not taking the radioactive waste. Last year, the Government Accountability Office estimated that the litigation will cost "taxpayers about $12.3 billion in damages through 2020 and could cost $500 million per year after 2020."
The final Reid-related invoice relates to the costs of finding and developing a new location for the waste that was supposed to end up at Yucca Mountain. When the Obama administration cut funding for Yucca Mountain, it appointed the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future. That panel was given two years to study alternatives to the Nevada site and to issue a report on the best alternatives. Where will that site (or sites) be? No one knows. But we can assume that the development costs for the new location will probably be on the same order of magnitude as those for Yucca Mountain. For this exercise, let's assume those costs will be $15 billion.
Let's tally the billions: $13.5 + $12.3 + $15 = $40.8 billion.
Reid's years-long opposition to Yucca Mountain is indicative of the split between the Republicans and the Democrats over nuclear power—the only source of energy that can provide large increments of reliable, carbon-free electricity in a relatively short time frame, at a relatively agreeable cost. (The key word in the previous sentence, obviously, is "relatively.")
