No wonder the weather is a bit cooler today. It must be a cold day somewhere when I find myself agreeing with Wayne Allard (one of our Republican Senators) and against Tom Strickland on a policy issue.
In question is the US Dept. of Energy plans to use Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as a permanent nuclear waste repository.
I will confess that I don’t relish the thought of trucks of nuclear waste rolling along I-70, even if the canisters are designed to take anything up to and including being broadsided by a freight train.
But, damn, folks, there isn’t a lot of choice in the matter. A quarter-century ago, when I was debating energy policy in high school, it was already blindingly obvious that leaving nuclear waste in rotting barrels in temporary cooling ponds around the nation was bad public policy. It’s unsafe, both from an environmental and from a security standpoint.
Problem is, the whole issue has been framed as one giant, national NIMBY game. Those that don’t have waste in their states don’t want it to pass through (let alone be stored there). Those who have it, are crying in the wilderness that something has to be done before the inevitable disaster.
For Strickland to take this tack in against his Senate race rival is particularly irresponsible, given that Colorado is on the sending end when it comes to getting plutonium shipped from Rocky Flats (right next to Strickland’s congressional district) to Savannah River in South Carolina.
Pretending it can just all stay where it is and that, somehow, the magical nuclear fairy will solve the problem is the height of irresponsibility.
There will be accidents (or deliberate sabotage), sooner or later. Better we take some reasonable action now, than do a lot of hand-wringing later.
nuclear is not safe.
it is not cheap.
it is not an answer.
(unless the question is how to annilate or destroy -that it does all too well.)
How is the great experiment at Chernoble faring, I wonder…?
we need to stop making nuclear waste, since we can’t even figure how to get rid of the waste we have.
A bit more difficult to just stop making nuclear waste (unless you have a way to make up, what, 5-10% of US electricity? 20%), esp. if you want to avoid other polluting sources. But even if we did, we *still* need a rational policy of what to do with the *existing* waste.
Chernobyl is probably not a fair model of modern nuclear power plants, any more than the Hindenburg is a fair model of modern air travel.
And nuclear power plants, per se, do not “annihilate or destroy.” Nuclear weapons do that pretty well, but oil fired power plants are not napalm, either.
Nuclear power may not be the answer, but it needs to be assessed on the merits, not, ah, the hyperbole.