Saturday, Dec. 3, 2022 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
The Sacramento Bee’s editorial reprinted Monday in the Sun — “Nuclear waste storage has been on the back burner for far too long” — discussed Washington’s refusal to deal with the problem of storing nuclear waste.
Many columnists and Sun editorials have opposed using Yucca Mountain as a nuclear storage facility. But such opposition ignores the elephant in the room — that this is not a local problem, but a national problem.
According to the Department of Energy, nuclear reactors in the U.S. produce more than 2,000 metric tons of radioactive waste each year. Most of it ends up being stored at the 80 U.S. nuclear power plants.
These sites are not secure. In July 2012, an 84-year-old nun with good intentions broke into a nuclear weapons complex and defaced a bunker holding bomb-grade uranium. Imagine what someone with bad intentions could do.
Yucca Mountain is the perfect candidate for storing nuclear waste. It is located at the Nevada Test Site, a pretty remote site; Area 51 is at the opposite end.
Access is severely restricted. The site has its own security force and is in the middle of the Nellis Air Force Range — a no-fly zone.
And, if Yucca Mountain becomes operational, it will need hundreds — if not a thousand or more — well-paid workers. That would be a real boon to the economy.
Yucca Mountain may present some problems, and that should be part of the discussion. But it also presents some positives that shouldn’t be ignored.
