Obama’s Atomic Half-Life
There can be no real nuclear power revival in America until we resolve the issue of how and where we store nuclear waste. And Barack Obama killed the most viable option for doing that, Yucca Mountain, in a bid to win Nevada votes back when he was running for President. And he hasn’t budged from that position since.
Maybe the best that can be said about the President is that he’s partially pro-nuclear. He’s okay with building new plants, apparently. Yet he opposes opening a safe and secure repository for storing the hazardous byproducts that inevitably result at Yucca Mountain, despite decades of exhaustive federal study and tens of billions of dollars spent. He’s for nuclear energy, but against nuclear waste storage.
He’s cynically talking out of both sides of his mouth, in order to woo pro-nuclear power voters in Ohio and anti-nuclear storage voters in Nevada. And he’s doing this confidently, sure that no one in the media, or elsewhere, will call him out on that glaring contradiction. That’s a little cynical, too.
