Sunday, February 27, 2011

Screwed Again

WeEnergies ratepayers paid in $215 million to pitch in for the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.  The project was cancelled, not for technical, but political reasons by the Obama Administration.  WeEnergies sued for $96 million.  Not unreasonable IMHO (though I'd like to have seen more), since much of the work was done and, well, someone has to pay for it.  After appeal and negotiated settlement, DOE is paying back all of $31 million.  That means $184 million down the Federal rathole and here we are, holding the bag....again.

4 comments:

Dad29 said...

Well, actually, it's not a "bag."

It's a bunch of casks filled with really hot stuff.

Beer, Bicycles and the VRWC said...

Note the use of the term "dump". that brings to mind a big ol' Waste Management truck pulling up and dumping a load of glowing "stuff" onto the ground. Yucca is an engineered repository that bears no resemblance to a "dump".

Dad29 said...

A friend of mine, now deceased, was a reg-affairs superintendent for the WE nukes.

The whole damn thing is a very sad story. Politics galore, no f*n common sense, nothing having to do with the science of it all.

Clinton was just as bad. Shut down a medical-isotope facility in WA State just b/c it was "nuclear."

Tell that to the dead patients who couldn't get treatment.

Beer, Bicycles and the VRWC said...

I spent many years in th business, mostly as a consultant. My first year was 1980 and I went to the first post-TMI emergency drill at Big Rock Point up in Charlevoix, MI. NRC and the utility invited the "intervenors" (read, Leftist obstructors of technological progress) unprecedented access. In the outbrief, they were allowed to speak (big mistake) and the first red-bandannaed, blue-jeaned, dope-smoking, Joan Baez-listening hippie wannabe woman stood up and read from prepared remarks on the evils of nuclear power, equating it with nuclear weapons and the "explosive nature" of nuclear plants and it wasn't good for the children and flowers and we should have a bake sale for B-1 bombers and fully fund the schools and capitalism was evil and the usual BS.

Point here is that the Left wants to stop nuclear energy while appearing to be for it. From Jimmy Carter I, who stopped reprocessing just as it was ready to start to Jimmy Carter II (Obama) who has killed Yucca Mountain for political gain and all those who either blocked progress or didn't have the stones to stand up for it, all are accountable for our (fictitious)"addiction to foreign oil".