QandO

August 23, 2004

At last, a little daylight filters through
Posted by Dale Franks

The editors of the New York Times support the nucelar waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain. Will wonders never cease?

There seems little doubt that the safest way to dispose of used fuel rods from nuclear power plants and highly radioactive wastes from nuclear weapons production is to bury them deep underground in stable geological formations resistant to leaking. Experts in this country and abroad, as well as many environmentalists, agree on that point. Although Yucca Mountain was partly chosen because of a perception that Nevada lacked the political clout to reject it, the site has a lot to recommend it. It sits on federal land where nuclear bombs were tested, in an arid desert where population density is low, well above the water table and atop volcanic rocks that have been there for 12 million to 13 million years. But technical obstacles, litigation, political opposition in Nevada and the sheer difficulty of the undertaking have slowed progress for 17 years and threaten to prolong the agony indefinitely.

The sheer idiocy of mandating that a waste facility should operate safely for 100,000+ years is evidently apparent even to the the editors of the New York Times, which is surprising, considering how often they are the kings of not getting it when it comes to other shibboleths of the Left.

Apart from anything else, one suspects that, sometime in that period, we'll probably come up with a wide range of technologies to secure this stuff.

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