The DoE is responsible for dealing with the nuclear waste. The NRC is responsible for nuclear safety. This regulation indicates that they do not want to do their part of the job. A freeze on new plants should remain in place until DoE gets its act together. This claim that indefinite storage of nuclear waste out in the open is safe is obviously wrong. Now that the NRC has made it, then all their claims to be pursuing nuclear safety are suspect as well. The NRC is out to promote nuclear power at any cost including subjecting the public to nuclear hazards.

Precisely, and Hansen has not looked at the way the poor economics of nuclear power take away opportunities to cut emissions faster and more completely.

Coal produces zero nuclear waste.

Nuclear power over promises and under delivers so it mostly trips itself up. http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...

That seems to be a mistaken view. Not much storage is needed. http://www.engineering.com/Ele...

Did the right thing to pull the plug on Yucca. Fabrication of data pretty much made proceeding impossible. He was handing out license extensions like candy and won't be missed on that account, but I think he would not have pulled this bozo move. Indefinite above ground storage in flood plains? What can they be thinking?

How ironic that this dodge is an expedient to try to license new plants.

Nuclear power has too high an opportunity cost and so slows climate response in addition to laying these booby traps all over the place. http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-C...

Reactors cause accidents. Accelerators won't. It is expensive because of all the prior improper risk taking.

Even the 60 year time frame is subject to risk that civil unrest in the environs of the waste would breach security. In the indefinite time frame, that becomes a dead certainty.

A portable accelerator could transmute the waste at each reactor site. The places are already well connected to the grid so bringing power to transmute the waste to stable isotopes would not be a problem. Just think of nuclear power as something that must be repaid.

The key problem with Yucca is scientific misconduct with data fabrication that taints the site beyond recall. Once the USGS scientists engaged in that, there is no clear way to understand what else may have been compromised. http://www.senaahq.bravehost.c...

When you understand the math, you'll understand that you are mistaken.

Not at all.

Wrongly so however. http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-C...