$15 billion nuclear waste storage failure

From the Warning Sign of Alan Caruba at Facts-not-Fantasy

Know the Warning Signs

“The American people have spent 30 years and $15 billion to determine whether Yucca Mountain would be a safe repository for our nation’s civilian and defense-related nuclear waste.”

That’s a quote of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) reported in the April issue of The Heartland Institute’s Environment and Climate News.

Compare that with the one year and 45 days it took to build the Empire State Building or the five years it took to build the Hoover Dam in the depths of the Great Depression. In the first half of the last century,

Americans knew how to get things done, but the rise of environmentalism in the latter half, starting around the 1970s, has increased the cost and time of any construction anywhere in the U.S. In the case of Yucca Mountain it has raised issues about nuclear waste that is currently stored is less secure conditions.

As reported by CNS News in January, “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has released the final two volumes of a five-volume safety report that concludes that Nevada’s Yucca Mountain meets all of its technical and safety requirements for the disposal of highly radioactive nuclear waste.” Five volumes!

So why the delay? The NRC says the Department of Energy “‘has not met certain land and water rights requirements’ and that other environmental and regulatory hurdles remain.”

Harry Reid

A Wall Street Journal editorial on March 30 asserted that It is not about environmental and regulatory hurdles. It is about a deal that Nevada Senator Harry Reid, the former Senate Majority Leader, cut with President Obama to keep Yucca Mountain from ever opening for use.

In return, Reid blocked nearly all amendments to legislation to shield Obama from having to veto bills. He virtually nullified the Senate as a functioning element of our government.

“Since there is no permanent disposal facility, spent fuel from the nation’s nuclear reactors—‘enough to fill a football field 17 meters deep’ according to a 2012 Government Accountability Office report—is currently being stored at dozens of above-ground sites. The GAO expects the amount of radioactive waste to double to 140,000 by 2055 when all of the currently operating nuclear reactors are retired.”

The United States where the development of nuclear fission and its use to generate electrical energy occurred is now well behind other nations that have built nuclear facilities and are adding new ones.

As Donn Dear, an energy expert with Power For USA, points out “there are only four new nuclear power plants under construction, all by Toshiba-Westinghouse LLC. One other plant, Watts Bar 2, whose construction was held up for several years, is being completed by TVA.”

Meanwhile, as Dear notes, “South Korea is building four nuclear reactors in the United Arab Emirates. The Russian company, Rosatom, is building power plants in Turkey, Belarus, Vietnam, and elsewhere. The China National Nuclear Corporation is scheduled to build over twenty nuclear power plants.”

These represent jobs and orders for equipment that are not occurring in the United States, along with the failure to utilize nuclear energy to provide the growing need for electricity here. The same environmental organizations opposing construction here are the same ones supporting the Environmental Protection Agency’s attack on coal-fired electrical plants.

The irony is, of course, that nuclear plants do not produce carbon dioxide emissions that the Greens blame for the non-existent “global warming”, not called “climate change.”

A cynical and false propaganda campaign has been waged against nuclear energy in the U.S., mostly notably with the Hollywood film, “The China Syndrome” about a reactor meltdown. If you want to worry about radiation, worry about the Sun. It is a major source.

Three incidents, Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, added to the fears, but no one was harmed by the Three Mile Island event and Chernobyl was an avoidable accident.

More recent was the March 11, 2011 shutdown of the Fukushima reactor in Japan as the result of an earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Three of its cores melted in the first three days, but there have been no deaths or radiation sickness attributed to this event. That’s the part you’re not told about.

Jimmy Carter

In the end, all it takes is one ignorant President to set progress back for decades. In this case it was President Jimmy Carter for not allowing reprocessing of nuclear waste, a standard practice in France where only one-fifth of spent fuel requires storage.

In the 1980s there were three U.S. corporations leading the way on the introduction and use of nuclear energy to produce electrical power; General Electric, Westinghouse Electric, and Babcock & Wilcox. Today only Babcock-Wilcox continues as a fully owned American company.

Thanks to President Obama, we have lost another six years on the Yucca Mountain project. That fits with his refusal to permit the Keystone XL pipeline. No energy project that might actually benefit America will ever see his signature.

Some are arguing that America is a nation in decline and they can surely point to the near destruction of our nuclear energy industry as one example. That decline can begin to end in 2017 with the inauguration of a new President.

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Iran a winner: U.S. agrees to a 'No Deal'

Sanctions to be terminated - no nuke sites closed,- research and development to continue

Regional Allies Won't Trust President Obama

Despite threats from Obama administration officials that the United States would abandon talks if Iran continued to demand greater concessions, Kerry extended his trip and conducted a series of meetings aimed at hashing out a statement of progress, a far cry from the detailed document officials vowed would be finalized by now.

“None of those measures” will move to scale back Iran’s program “include closing any of our facilities,” said Javid Zarif, Irans negotiator and Kerry's counterpart. “We will continue enriching; we will continue research and development.”

“Our heavy water reactor will be modernized and we will continue the Fordow facility,” Zarif said. “We will have centrifuges installed in Fordow, but not enriching.”

The move to allow Iran to keep centrifuges at Fordow, a controversial onetime military site, has elicited concern that Tehran could ramp up its nuclear work with ease.

Zarif said that once a final agreement is made, “all U.S. nuclear related secondary sanctions will be terminated,” he said. “This, I think, would be a major step forward.”

Zarif also revealed that Iran will be allowed to sell “enriched uranium” in the international market place and will be “hopefully making some money” from it.

European Union High Representative Federica Mogherini said in a statement that the sides had “taken a decisive step” in paving over disagreements on key fronts and would now work “for a final deal” by June.

In return, the United States and international partners will work to “terminate” all of the “nuclear-related sanctions” currently being imposed on Iran.

The United Nations also will move to endorse the ongoing Joint Plan of Action interim deal and terminate all of its previous security council resolutions on Iran.

The Fordow nuclear facility will eventually be “converted from an enrichment site to a nuclear psychics and tech center,” Mongherini said. No fissile material such as uranium will be permitted at the former military site.

However, this could allow Iran to continue running thousands of nuclear centrifuges that could be used to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels.

“As Iran pursues a peaceful nuclear program,” it will tentatively agree to limit its nuclear enrichment capabilities and stockpiles for a specific duration, according to Mongherini’s statement, which was also read in Persian by Zarif.

Iran also will undertake a “joint venture” to redesign and modernize its heavy water reactor at Arak, a site that has raised concerns about the plutonium path to a nuclear bomb.

The site “will not produce weapons-grade plutonium,” according to the statement.

“We’ve done significant work,” Zarif said after the joint statements had been read. “We’ve taken a major step, but we’re still some time away from reaching where we want to be.”

Many concessions Iran has pushed for in recent days have now been agreed to by the United States, according to multiple reports and sources.

Prior to the news conference, Zarif informed the Iranian state-controlled press that “no agreement will be signed” in the near term.

“We have said right from the beginning that no agreement would be signed today. We have always stated that there could be only one agreement which could go into effect at the end of the talks on July 1 if everything goes well,” he was quoted as saying.

Zarif told reporters late Wednesday amid meetings with the United States and other P5+1 one nations that he was “all smiles” after days of intensive talks in which Tehran has given little ground on American efforts to reduce the size of its nuclear program and uranium stockpiles.

Keep in mind - this is now the fourth delay in agreement talks over Iran's nuclear power and Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and other allies in the Middle East neighborhood do not trust President Obama.

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