Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), left, and Senator John Ensign (R-Nev) have introduced legislation that would establish a nine-member panel that would report its recommendations for a national nuclear waste repository to Congress in two years. The commission would be asked to recommend alternatives for managing highly radioactive spent fuel from commercial power plants, and also high-level nuclear waste that was generated by military weapons programs. Those wastes are now kept at sites in 39 states.
The government's policy has been to place the material in an underground repository under development at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. However, President Barack Obama opposes the Yucca site and has indicated he plans to dramatically scale back the project.Majority Leader Reid also oppose the Yucca Mountain repository.The Center supports Yucca Mountain as the repository for nuclear waste and we want the entire nuclear waste operation taken out of the Department of Energy and placed in a new Nuclear Waste Management Agency, which would also handle reprocessing, preferably at Yucca Mountain. (Lexus/Nexus, 3/14/09)
No comments:
Post a Comment