Thread: Obama wants to cancel Yucca Mountain funding

Most on-site storage facilities in nuclear plants are nearing full. That was the original driver for the Yucca Mountain facility. I think the stat on it is that the originally planned size of the Yucca facility could fit less than half of the current nuclear waste. The reason Yucca Mountain is necessary is because of the ban on new nuclear facilities, many of these nuclear plants (and their associated waste storage facilities) are nearing the end of their original life expectancy and they can't be replaced. There is also the post-9/11 national security issue, in that a central storage location in such a location as Yucca Mountain would be secured from any sort of dirty-bomb attack.

The overall solution to the energy crisis is to decommission all coal plants, including "clean coal," at the end of their life span and ban new construction. Allow construction of new nuclear plants with waste reprocessing. Finally, finish the Yucca Mountain facility to store the end-product waste as necessary.

Obama is really just showing that he has no interest in change inasmuchas change is a reversal of anything that happened in the last 8 years and generally overextending the federal governments power.

But if waste reprocessing were allowed, Yucca Mountain (or any other waste storage facility) wouldn't be needed in the first place. Yucca Mountain exists mainly to store used nuclear fuel (the stuff from inside "spent" fuel rods), and that's the same stuff that gets reprocessed and reused when reprocessing is allowed. Your proposed energy solution sounds good, except for the part about finishing Yucca Mountain. Yucca Mountain is unnecessary when fuel is reprocessed.