Utah- Bennett may consider 'other alternatives' to Yucca Mtn plan

Curious, curious, as Repubs who backed Bush's plan for Yucca turn their stands to another direction ...kinda like the Repubs who backed the Iraq invasion now calling it a lie ..."things are getting curiouser and curiouser..."

SALT LAKE CITY -- Three years after he sided with a Bush administration plan to bury nuclear waste deep inside Nevada's Yucca Mountain, U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett said last week that he might favor leaving the waste at the reactors that produced it.

The Utah Republican had supported the effort in a gamble to block a proposed nuclear waste storage site 45 miles from Salt Lake
City. But as Yucca Mountain's political and scientific problems mount, Bennett appears to be hedging his bet.

The senator's remarks come on the heels of more evidence of fraudulent science presented last week that could doom the nuclear waste dump project and turn into a criminal investigation. The Yucca Mountain depository suffered a serious setback last month when it was revealed U.S. Geological Survey scientists may have falsified documents on the suitability of the site. The FBI has launched a criminal investigation.

In what may add fuel to the fire, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, told attendees at a University of Utah political symposium on Friday that memos written by government scientists appear to show a concerted effort to cover up or falsify test results at Yucca Mountain, planned as the nation's underground repository for 77,000 tons of defense waste and used reactor fuel.

Gov. Jon Huntsman has come out squarely against Yucca Mountain and in support of leaving the highly radioactive nuclear material on site at the reactors -- a move Reid advocates. Two of the three U.S. House members from Utah have said they oppose the project, and Republican Rep. Chris Cannon, who voted to send the waste to Nevada, has changed his stand. An increasingly vocal cadre of state lawmakers also have recently joined the chorus.

more...

http://www.newutah.com/print.php?sid=51776

has now or ever will be injured by Yucca Mountain.

The case of scientific fraud in the water table calculations still doesn't prove that nuclear materials will actually harm anyone. If we really want to discuss fraudulent science, we ought also to be discussing the notion that the lights of Las Vegas pose less risk to the people of West Virginia or the people of Montana or the people of Wyoming or for that matter the people of New Jersey, all of whom are now breathing, eating and drinking waste created to light up Wayne Newton billboards.

The majority nuclear fission products in the naturally occurring Oklo reactors stayed in place for nearly two billion years - in a rain forest and this without a single human intervention or advanced human materials design.

http://www.nei.org/documents/maps/statebystate/arizona.html

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_glance/reactors/sanonofre.html

When Nevada lives in the dark, when it doesn't buy power from Arizona and California nuclear plants, it will have a case. For now, it doesn't live in the dark and Wayne Newton's billboards and all of the other lights on the strip are purchasing power from a nuclear fueled grid. Nevada is merely seeking a license to kill people in other states on the grounds that someone, somewhere, might (not will) be injured in the next millenium from something at Yucca Mountain.

Now I happen to think there ae better alternatives to Yucca for resource utilization reasons, but this doesn't mean on the other hand that I believe that any of this balderdash about the "danger" of Yucca can be taken seriously by rational people. This is an orgy of ignorance, superstition and fear. It is nothing else.

When someone somewhere has actually died in the United States from the storage of so called "nuclear waste," we can intelligently discuss risk. Until then, the resistance is pure balderdash and speculation.