Bush faces nuclear fallout in Nevada over £60bn mountain of radioactive wa

[seemslikeadream]

Bush faces nuclear fallout in Nevada over £60bn mountain of radioactive waste

Dan Glaister in Las Vegas
Friday October 22, 2004
The Guardian

...

Yucca Mountain, projected to cost around $60bn (£32.8bn), has been chosen by the Bush administration to be the nation's nuclear waste repository, set to hold the existing 40,000 tons of waste produced to date by the country's nuclear power stations.

"This material is the deadliest substance known to mankind," said Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Citizen Alert, a local group that has campaigned against the repository. "It's one million times more radioactive when it comes out of the reactor core than when it went in."

....

The polls in Nevada have ranged between a 10% lead for Mr Bush to a 1% lead for Mr Kerry. In 2000 Mr Bush won the state by 3.5%, or 22,000 votes, but Nevada has changed since then. The fastest-growing state in the US in 2003, its population has risen by 300,000 in the past four years to reach 2.4 million. For this election, there will be 1.1 million registered voters, 66,000 of them Hispanics, who traditionally lean toward the Democratic party. The increase in population means that Nevada now contributes five votes to the electoral college, one more than in 2000. Accordingly, the state has become an increasingly important and hard-fought battleground in this year's electoral race.

"In 2000 there was no campaign here; the Democrats conceded," said David Damore, assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. "But this year there's been a strong effort to get new voters registered. The electorate looks very different to the way it did four years ago."

...

In August Mr Kerry defended his position, saying: "Back in 1987 the idea of a national repository seemed like a reasonable thing ... the more I have looked at the issue, the more I have learned about it, the less safe, the less comfortable I am with the possibility."

...

No mention is made of the native American name for the mountain, Moving Hill, nor scientists' nickname for it, Old Leaky. Nor is there space for a Geological Society of America report which warned that should moisture enter the mountain where nuclear waste is stored in bundles of rods, "radioactive volcanoes could form on the surface".

more
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1333145,00.html

[tlcandie]

1. I think it's high time we stop pulling the elements out of the ground

which is their home unless they are put to a positive use for all beings!

Until then we have to find a way to transmute these toxins so they can be released w/o toxic effects back into the atmosphere.

[randr]

2. The Nuclear waste dump in Nevada was *s' first flip/flop

I would hope the good people of Nevada would remember the way B* promised a thorough and scientific analysis of the Yucca Mountain proposal. And when they acknowledge how easy it was for B* to dump on them I hope they reciprocate justly.

[leesa]

3. They'll have to make a lot of DU bullets and tanks to use this up

Which country gets salted with our radioactive waste next?

[progressiveBadger]

4. Radioactive Volcanoes?!?!?!

That doesn't sound too healthy.