Ugly American wrote on July 10, 2008 01:13 PM: "
Residents in the Vaucluse, a popular southern French tourist destination, were banned yesterday from drinking well-water or swimming or fishing in two rivers after a uranium leak from one of France's nuclear power plants.
"

It was just 75kg = 165 pounds but now you can't drink the water, eat the fish or even swim in it.

I can't wait to get 800 metric tonnes of that crap shipped here! Just think what it'll do for tourism and having it upstream of our water supply is simply brilliant!

Taxpaying Nevadan wrote on July 09, 2008 06:05 PM: Why is Reid wasting time and not doing his job. He should be negotiating with the Feds for dollars in return for us taking Yucca. With a $1,250,000,000.00 State deficit it is not like we don’t need the money. Maybe our school kids can then get some new text books!

Why Harry, why? wrote on July 09, 2008 05:27 PM: I for one am tired of this political nonsense which is destroying our Country. Maybe Harry Reid would rather continue to subsidize foreign Governments that are bent on our destruction then doing the right thing.

Yucca Employee wrote on July 09, 2008 04:49 PM: Thank you Harry (-:

When the license application was struggling a few years back for technical reasons, Harry’s budget cuts provided an excellent reason to `slow down’ and complete what is now a high quality, technically defensible license based on sound science. Had the project been fully funded back then, we would not have been able to submit it on time and the delays would not have been attributable to `money’ reasons. The politics would have been ugly (Yucca has the money but can’t meet it’s deadlines, etc….)

In essence, the Yucca Mountain Project owes it’s success to our Senior Senator from Nevada. Thank you Harry!

Skeptical Nevadan wrote on July 09, 2008 04:45 PM: One other thing for all of the fear-mongering Yucca opponents who ceaselessly harp on the alleged dangers of transporting the waste to the proposed repository:

Where was your outrage, your conscientious objection, your chicken-little clarion call, when a train tanker carrying toxic chlorine was running loose down the tracks just the other day in the middle of our fair city, which you consider terribly endangered by shipments to a repository 100 miles away?

Most of those shipments will never actually travel through the city, and yet you constantly anguish over the bogus phantom of a deadly "Glow Train" careening through Downtown and the Strip.

Never mind that dozens of such "Glow Trains" carrying toxic substances travel through the heart of the city every day, and that these substances could cause considerable damage if released in a train crash (chlorine would release potentially deadly fumes into the atmosphere and have immediate consequences, in stark contrast to radioactive ceramic pellets housed in virtually indestructible waste canisters).

It's nothing short of absurd to hear people rant and wail about dangers that don't really exist when all the while they are surrounded by potential dangers they don't give a second thought. All we heard was a concerned citizen or two making a 911 call: "Um, there's a train car flying down the tracks and it isn't attached to one of them things that pulls the train, er, a locomotion."

"Can you describe the train, Sir?"

Yeah, it's a relatively thin-walled container on wheels that would puncture and spill it contents if it were to collide with another rigid object, potentially releasing toxic fumes into the atmosphere, where they could waft leisurely toward the Strip!

Doubt you'll hear much concern or outrage from the alarmist anti-Yucca crowd, however....

Skeptical Nevadan wrote on July 09, 2008 04:20 PM: Sen. Reid has an odd definition of success. He crows about managing to get the Yucca Mountain Project's budget eviscerated for fiscal year 2008, and yet that seems to have provided the incentive for DOE to submit the license application for the proposed repository ahead of schedule! That's almost unheard of in the world of gov't projects, which typically are completed by non-agency experts who have a vested interest in "doing just one more study" (it's good for their wallets, their careers, and frankly, they find it fascinating and intellectually rewarding work).

Long story short, any big gov't-sponsored project such as the repository will suffer from the expansion of research into less germane areas ("Hey, we should probably study the effects of a potential meteorite impact!").

To put it another way: Reid probably did the project a big favor and forced it to submit the license application by a firm deadline, when otherwise it could have been "just one more study" for who knows how many years.

Perhaps our Harry's latest attempt to slash the project budget will have a similar effect and inspire the NRC to approve construction of the repository in record time!

Moral of the story: Political expendience and sound science don't mix. Reid and other opponents should let the regulatory process run its proper course and stop trying to sabotage the project using political ploys and agitprop campaigns.

Functioning on the gut level of humanitarian Roger's "Good to watch Yucca go down" may be emotionally satisfying (in the way a football to the groin is satisfying to watch, stimulating as it does our primitive brain stem). But we'd still be living in grass huts if we took that attitude towards technological change, science, engineering, medicine, and so on.

Not the proper arena for a "bunh of losers."

Tym wrote on July 09, 2008 11:10 AM: That's real nice Roger. Way to be supportive by calling fellow Nevadans losers because they might lose their jobs when all they are trying to do is get a good paying job to help put food on the table. To top it off, you can't even spell. You're a winner....

Ugly American wrote on July 09, 2008 10:38 AM: The last cost estimate for the Yucca Mountain project was $61B.

To put that in perspective, using Nevada Solar One as the guide you could build 5Gw (more than the Vegas peak use) worth of solar power plants with the storage array & backup natural gas turbine generators for $20B and be free of coal and nuclear waste forever.

Roger wrote on July 09, 2008 08:54 AM: Good to watch Yucca go down. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunh of losers...