Good Riddance, Yucca Mountain

Obama pulls the plug on the nuclear industry's last best hope.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, March 3, 2009, at 7:49 PM ET

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We've seen a lot of hyperbole lately about the significance of a presidency that's all of six weeks old. I hesitate to add to it. But the following statement happens to be the literal truth.

The ramifications of the 2008 presidential election will be felt for 1 million years.

One million years is a long time. A million years ago, Homo erectus (who looked like this, not this) was getting ready to invent the hand axe and discover fire. Yet 1 million years is the length of time that the Bush administration was preparing to guarantee (apparently to our successor hominid species) the safe storage of spent nuclear fuel rods inside Nevada's Yucca Mountain, in a waste facility whose approval had been making its way through three branches of government for a comparatively brief 32 years. The goal was to start dumping this high-level nuclear waste inside Yucca Mountain in 2020.