Yucca Mountian

By Greg Ortiz

Yucca Mountain is a mountain in Nevada about 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas. It is the proposed site for putting all the nuclear waste from nuclear reactors. Nuclear waste can't be treated with as other solid waste is. Nuclear waste has to be stored because the only way of destroying it is waiting until it is deteriorated into nothing. That is where Yucca Mountain comes in. This mountain is actually a extinct volcano that has a series of underground caves. That is where the nuclear waste is to be stored. But as the Obama administration was elected into office the new secretary of the Department of Energy, which is the government agency that was head of the Yucca mountain project, proposed to shut down Yucca Mountain and put the nuclear waste somewhere else. The project was opened in 1982 when congress told D.O.E. that they had to find a site to store nuclear waste. Yucca mountain was planned to be ready to recieve spent uranium rods on January 31, 1998. Over a Decade later they proposed that the opening date would be off to March of 2017. But unless Congress changes the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, that was enaceted by Congress in 1987 that made Yucca Mountain the site to put Nuclear waste, Obama and The Secretary of D.O.E. ,Steven Chu, can not shut down the project. If the Ammendment is changed and Obama and Chu get there way then where would the Nuclear waste go? And if it was shut down millions of dollars would go to waste. And that is tax money that is being spent for this project, our money right out the window.