Summary
It's hard to know exactly how much Yucca Mountain had to do with his victory. "Obviously, there's never one issue that determines how people are going to vote," said Nevada Rep. Shelley Berkley, a fierce Yucca Mountain opponent. "But I believe there was a strong sense that [President] [Barack Obama] presented a clear alternative to [John McCain]'s manic obsession with putting waste in Yucca Mountain."
Sen. [Harry Reid] has now pronounced Yucca Mountain dead, and Berkley believes he's right. Nick Shapiro, a spokesman for Obama's transition team, confirmed by e-mail that Obama believes "Yucca Mountain should not and will not move forward." But it's unclear exactly how Obama will kill the project, which was written into law back in 1987. [Judy Treichel] thinks the new administration will cut off the repository's funds; Berkley hopes Obama will pull its license application.On Nov. 6, 2008, two days after Obama's victory, Sproat went before a small authence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., to talk about nuclear waste. The Las Vegas papers later quoted only a snippet of his remarks, in which he admitted that Obama could withdraw the license application; Rep. Berkley's office was running with that theme. But Sproat was not really so pessimistic. Halting the Yucca Mountain project "would basically cast the whole process and national strategy into a lot of confusion and uncertainty," he said. Whatever faith Nevada has invested in Obama, Sproat made clear that he has more in the future of their state's repository. And though Sproat was out of his job in January, he's not giving it up.See the full content of this document
Extract
Mountain of Doubt
When Edward "Ward" Sproat moved into his new office at the U.S. Department of Energy in early 2006, the future of Yucca Mountain looked about as bleak as nuclear winter. The atomic waste storage project, which had never amounted to more than a five-mile-long tunnel through a mountain 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, had already been hammered by lawsuits and starved of funding. Now it was tainted by scandal and absurdity. A series of incriminating e-mails had revealed how some project scientists may have fudged data to meet deadlines; a federal judge had declared the Environmental Protection Agency's 10,000year safety time frame inadequate.
If Yucca Mountain is to open, the ruling implied, the EPA must protect the area's creatures for as long as nuclear was...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
