Mark Kleiman has a must-read piece on nulear power, in which he cogently outlines the case for nuclear power. However, as a partisan and a polemicist, I shall choose to focus on this part of his post:
Nuclear waste. This is a problem only if you think that we need to plan waste disposal that will (no, I’m not making this up) survive the end of civilization and be safe for the ignorant primitive nomads who will wander the earth 10,000 years from now. Actually, the solution isn’t technically very hard.
Current plans are to deal with all the waste, high-level and low-level, together. The idea is bury the stuff in deep salt caves and pray the water table doesn’t rise. And of course no one wants to have the burial site nearby; that fact just might cost George Bush, who broke a campaign promise and did the right thing, Nevada’s electoral votes.
In the Washington Post today, George Will writes:
John Kerry recently stopped in Las Vegas to say: “Rest assured, Nevada. If I’m president, Yucca Mountain will not be a depository…”
But in 1996 President Bill Clinton promised to veto any attempt to make Nevada even a temporary repository. That promise helped him beat Bob Dole there by just 4,730 votes, the smallest state margin that year.
In 2000 George W. Bush promised not to make Nevada a temporary repository, but said “sound science” would guide him regarding establishing a permanent repository there. He beat Al Gore 50-46 (301,575 to 279,978). A switch of 10,799 votes would have made Gore president.
In 2002 Bush approved Yucca Mountain as the permanent site. Congress said Nevada’s governor could veto the selection but that his veto could be overridden by majorities in both houses. He vetoed it; Congress overrode him.
By this protracted dance of democracy the interests of an American majority — 161 million live within 75 miles of today’s storage sites — prevailed, respectfully, over the objections of an intense minority, the approximately 2 million people who live in southern Nevada. Kerry’s willingness to overturn this accommodation reflects a cold, and factually correct, calculation having nothing to do with the national interest: For the intense and compact Nevada minority, unlike for the diffuse American majority, this is a vote-determining issue.
Two points:
1.) Bush flip-flopped to do the right thing. Kerry seems to have changed his mind as a result of political calculations.
2.) It isn’t the GOP and the mainstream media unfairly portraying Kerry as having consistently changing positions. It is the fact that Kerry has consistently changing positions, based on crass political opportunism.
M. Scott Eiland
Maybe I’m reading the article wrong, but it seems that GWB didn’t flip-flop at all on this, unless the science which led to the choice was not “sound.” How the voters of Nevada choose to view that, of course, is their affair.
As for Mr. Kerry, unless he voted for placing the repository on prior occasions (the article does not state this), I don’t see a flip-flop for him here, though he’s obviously taking the position that might win him Nevada. Will *does* show that on the issues of free trade and the Kyoto treaty, Kerry has flip-flopped blatantly to pander to his base.
S.W. Anderson
Kerry’s doing the right thing, while, as always, Bush is doing what industry wants.
Right now, in the East and West, nuclear waste repositories/facilties have leaking vessels that most certainly *do* represent a hazard, current and future. The Bush adminsitration’s answer is to reclassify what “safe enough” means and otherwise jigger rules, definitions and standards, to suit the industry.
The nuclear industry’s record is a very mixed bag, one that fails to inspire confidence about the willingness of those in it to pass on making an extra buck to be as safe as possible. Check around and you’ll find plenty of stories about leaks, inadequate containment, questionable transport of materials and all manner of games played with rules and standards.
Those 2 million people in Nevada know how that goes. The defense establishment spent years telling them all those nuclear weapons tests in their neighborhood were no threat to them, nohow, no way. Just go out and watch for the bright light, feel the earth shake and enjoy the mushroom cloud in the distance — great entertainment for the whole family.
Well, many of those families today will tell you about the high incidence of birth defects and cancers they’ve suffered, and about friends and neighbors lost in the years since.
I don’t blame them for not trusting government or industry authorities when it comes nuclear safety. Between what those authorities/executives don’t know and what they don’t intend to let get in the way of their bigger agendas, their activities pose too great a potential for danger to people who only have their votes and whatever legal recourse they can afford to protect them.
Do you suppose for one minute Bush would OK an N-waste repository anywhere near Crawford, Texas? And how about you and *your* back 40?
JPS
SWA:
You point out that “nuclear waste repositories/facilties have leaking vessels that most certainly *do* represent a hazard.” Then you praise Kerry for doing the right thing–defined, I guess, as maintaining the status quo!
Your bashing of Bush and industry (boo! hiss!) doesn’t get us any closer to solving the problem that you (accurately) lay out.
Dodd
Bush didn’t flip-flop, he promised not to put a temporary repository there (which, when no longer used, would require the materials to be shipped back out – the shipping being the dangerous part) but to follow sound science (and it is, Yucca Mountain is remarkably stable geologically) in determining whether or not to make it a permanent one. SW Anderson’s post is incoherent to the point of incomprehensibility. For him to say that maintaining the current sitation – leaving the waste in storage facilities he himself notes are “leaky” – is the right thing to do while Bush, backed by 20+ years of studies and a rather consistent Congress, is the shill of industry is an example of partisan blinders-wearing the like of which I have rarely ever seen, even from him. It’s stunning, really.
Dodd
Kerry voted, “Nay” on Yucca, BTW, so, unusual though that circumstance is, he doesn’t seem to have flip-flopped here.
S.W. Anderson
What part of, “The Bush adminsitration’s answer is to reclassify what `safe enough’ means and otherwise jigger rules, definitions and standards, to suit the industry.” is so hard to understand?
The administration’s answer for these leaking threats to groundwater and to people in their surrounding areas isn’t to tuck the radioactive material away in Yucca Mountain, at least not for the time being. Rather, it’s to cap and/or line the craters they’re in or else just don’t worry about them, reclassify the problem away — measures that some people who know a lot more about such things than I contend is pure reckless endangerment.
But industry people find the price is right, relatively speaking. And besides, *they* don’t live just down the road.
In fact, the industry has been allowed to create one hell of a problem. It may be that storage in Yucca Mtn. is the best of the available options; I never said it wasn’t.
My point, for anyone having comprehension difficulties, is that Nevadans who don’t want the nation’s nuclear waste dumped in their back 40 have every right and plenty of good reason to fight like hell to keep it out.
Slartibartfast
First, it isn’t in anyone’s back 40. It’s smack in the middle of the NTS, which is government land. Second, Nevada, outside of Las Vegas, is arguably the least densely populated state in the continental US. Alaska has got more remote regions, but just try getting permission from Canada to truck nuclear waste through their country.
JPS
Say, listen, S.W. Anderson:
I was simply wondering why you praise Kerry for a negative action (pledging to block the construction of a long-term storage facility) right after you point out the problems with the current arrangements.
There’s really no need to be an insulting prick about it.