If you did not watch the Democrat debate a few nights ago you may not have heard about the remarks by the big 3, Hillary, Edwards, and Obama, about the Yucca Mountain Repository which is supposed to store up to 77,000 tons of nuclear waste for thousands of years.
Their response to the question posed by the moderator, “would you kill the Yucca Mountain project?”, was a resounding yes.
Obama’s answer:
I will end the notion of Yucca Mountain because it has not been based on the sort of sound science that can assure the people in Nevada that they’re going to be safe.
Not based on sound science aye? Well, you were a elected official of the State of Illinois, one that currently has the Zion nuclear facility in storage, along with thousands of tons of nuclear waste just sitting there waiting for storage. Think this could pose a health risk?
No worries about that but instead he panders to the voters and says he doesn’t believe a site built specifically to store this waste and prevent any health risks to the population is based on sound science.
Hillary is against it also and:
We do have to figure out what to do with nuclear waste.
How about doing what the French are doing? Making themselves much less dependent on oil and the countries that supply that oil by using nuclear power AND reprocessing that used nuclear fuel:
Over the past four decades, America’s reactors have produced about 56,000 tons of used fuel. Jack Spencer, research fellow for nuclear energy policy at the Thomas A. Rowe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, says this “waste” has enough energy to power every U.S. household for a dozen years.
As we’ve noted, France long ago achieved energy independence by relying on nuclear energy for most of its power needs. But it also leads the world in processing this waste to create even more energy.
The French have reprocessed spent nuclear fuel for 30 years without incident. There have been no accidental explosions, no terrorist attacks, no contribution to nuclear proliferation. Their facility in La Hague has safely processed more than 23,000 tons of spent fuel, or enough to power the entire country for 14 years.
Our country pioneered the technology to reprocess it but banned the process in the late 70’s because every time its reprocessed it increases the plutonium content. Our country was scared it could fall into the wrong hands. But France, Russia, and Japan have been reprocessing for decades with no problems which alleviates the problem of what to do with the waste.
Why not offer this up, with increased security measures to ensure the safety of the reprocessed fuel rather then banning nuclear power altogether as Edwards suggested here:
I am against building more nuclear power plants, because I do not think we have a safe way to dispose of the waste. I think they’re dangerous, they’re great terrorist targets and they’re extraordinarily expensive.
They are not, in my judgment, the way to green this — to get us off our dependence on oil.
Amazing. The only technology with the ability to replace fossil fuels known to man, that does not emit CO2, and Democrats are against it.
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