President Barack Obama has made it clear that Yucca Mountain will never be used as radioactive waste dump site, after cutting out the project’s funding in the recently proposed draft federal budget.
The decision is part of the “new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal” that aims for “improved performance and accountability for the environmental legacy of the Nation’s nuclear weapons program by addressing health and safety risks across the country.”
It is also an important follow-up to promises Obama made during his election campaign that he would bring the project to its death bed.
Keeping in mind that the budget proposal “is the first step in the annual federal budget process,” which “serves as a ‘starting point’ for Congress to consider as it creates, debates and passes the annual spending bills,” as Robert Longley explains, it’s pretty much guaranteed that after two decades of planning, the waste storage project will never see the light of day.
This spells a major victory for Yucca Mountain – located “in the heart of the Western Shoshone Nation” – and to all opponents of the dump site, who’ve continually warned about the danger it would pose to all life in the region.
All it would take is one earthquake.
Over the past 20 years there have been more than 600 recorded seismic events that registered over 2.5 on the Richter scale, all of which occurred within a 50-mile radius of the site – the largest being the 1992 Little Skull Mountain earthquake which registered 5.6 and caused damage to the DOE’s Yucca Mountain project office. Another nearby earthquake occurred 10 years later, measuring 4.2.
The DOE originally claimed the area would only see one earthquake about “every 10,000 years.”
John Ahniwanika Schertow is an indigenous rights activist of Mohawk (Kanienkehaka) and mixed-European descent. For the past 8 years, he has served as the e... 
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It’s a little known fact that Mrs. Obama has a distant cousin who lives in Las Vegas and who used to work at the Yucca Mountain Project. Although she left the Project long before Obama began his Presidential campaign, I wonder if while working on the campaign she could have mentioned the wasteful spending at Yucca Mountain. Could she have mentioned the endless meetings and video conferencing with dozens of high salaried individuals where low priority items were discussed with no resolution achieved? Could she have mentioned the endless reams of paper that were discarded when a single typo was found on a great number of documents over 1,500 pages long (why replace only the one page with the typo when it’s easier to dump all 1,500 pages and print again)? Could she have mentioned the irony of Yucca Mountain’s reluctance to engage in or even acknowledge the necessity of technological advances in many areas, while Yucca Mountain spokespersons “claimed” to be on the cutting edge of technology?
Add that to $250,000.00 spent here or there on “ego driven” projects, $500,000.00 spent here or there on substandard products that are recommended by friends of high ranking Yucca Mountain Officials, and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on unqualified “consultant” fees paid to more “friends”. Could these and many other examples of wasteful spending have been the downfall of Yucca Mountain? We’ve spent over 13 billion dollars on Yucca Mountain. How much of that was wasted? Should we just keep wasting money? Seriously, how much does it cost to build what amounts to a big hole in the ground… no matter how fancy the hole is. Granted, Yucca Mountain was supposed to be a very fancy hole in the ground. But, it’s a hole in the ground people. Come on. How much is that supposed to cost? Maybe it’s not politics at all. Maybe it’s just good math.