Nuclear Waste

I've always believed that we as a race are not equipped to plan for events that exceed our civilization's existence many times over in duration.    Yet the quest for massive amounts of centralized (read billable) electrical production, encouraged by government demand for access for enough bomb building plutonium to destroy all life on earth many times over, drove us to build many nuclear power plants that are now operating beyond their design life.  Even more foolishly, the incredibly deadly waste they turn out by the ton "every four to six years", in the form of "spent" fuel rods that must be kept in deep pools of cooling water for years before they can be moved to a long term waste depository, has been allowed to build up in those pools with no long term storage in sight.  There, at the generator sites, they are more accessible to terrorists and to natural disasters such as befell the Fukashima Daiichi reactors which are still leaking cooling water into the Pacific Ocean and will never be fully "cleaned up" in our lifetime.
For years our nation had a plan to store waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada and we spent probably a billion dollars preparing the site.  When it was almost ready in Obama's first year, he keep a promise to Senator Harry Reid  and stopped the whole project.  Did this stop the nuclear power industry from continuing to produce waste?  Do we have a new waste depository plan?  No and no!  In 2010 they got a Nuclear Regulatory Commission extension of 60 years for the time they could store waste on site ( http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2012/2012-06-11-092.html).   Now I ask you what for profit corporation, that undoubtedly has a holding company insulated it from possible losses by separately incorporating each nuclear power plant, could be trusted to care for money loosing waste storage and processing for 60 years AFTER that plant is decommissioned as these aging plants soon will be?  The linked E.N.S.  article discusses the federal appeals case of that NRC ruling but not the long tern implications.  Clearly the industry plans to stick the tax payers with ALL the waste costs as soon as they stop making a generating profit just as they have always done for most of the insurance costs and most of the cost of preparing Yucca Mountain Repository.

So just one more reminder and I promise no more till next year, we don't need to build more Nukes!  The means to survive on all clean renewables is here if we just put all our resources that we are currently spending on fossil fuel subsidies, defense of our access to other countries fossil fuels, world domination, farm subsidies to millionaires and the clean up of future obsolete  waste.
Next I hope to be writing about our life with our electric car that should be arriving soon.