Chuck Muth: The Yucca Mountain Gold Mine

After my post re: the Bob Loux letter re: his objections to the DOE's plans for Yucca, the always lucid Chuck Muth emailed me the link to this post on his new Yucca Facts blog. In it he presents the many possible Pros for a nuclear waste repository. Although I still think the DOE's Not-Yet-Invented Supercalifrajalistic Robots are pretty funny, Chuck makes many excellent observations. (Let's call them Muthservations for purposes of this discussion.)

The first Muthservation is that the great state of NV currently has a variety of problems: a budget shortfall, water shortages, high energy costs, road construction needs, and a lack of quality higher education opportunities. (Agreed. Actually, as Muth points out, these are all Facts so agreement is quite beside the point. Therefore, I withdraw it and just nod knowingly.) The next Muthservation (as recently reported in the Lousville Courier-Journal) is that uranium is now selling for around $73 a pound and that We-Have-The-Technology to extract it from "worthless" nuclear waste, so the uranium that could be recovered from the "waste" would be worth $7.6 billion. (wow!) Muth suggests that if Nevada became the site for our Great Nation's nuclear reprocessing center as well as the storage site for all the waste, Nevadan's could/would benefit in the form of a major budget surplus, plus a lot of highly skilled high-paying jobs, not to mention lots of cheap electricity from the plant (me Like-ee).

Chuck further Muthservates (that is the verb form) that some of the surplus money could be used to build a water pipeline from the Pacific to Yucca Mountain, where the power from the Nuclear Power Plant could be used to desalinate the ocean water (again, We-Have-The-Technology, given the ability to generate enough heat, which a nuclear reactor could do and then some) and solve all our water shortage problems. (This is freaking brilliant, so why is this the first time I've heard about this idea? Am I That out of touch with the talking points in favor of Yucca? If so, shame on me. I'll take comfort in the fact that I'm not alone because a small straw poll of Nevada residents (i.e. a few friends and family members) revealed that no one else had heard of this being a viable idea either.)

Finally, as a result of the nuclear "waste" repository (I shall never again think of it as waste), Muth says that with the reprocessing and uranium extraction center, the power plant, and the desalinization facility, we'd then have every reason to establish a Yucca Mountain Nuclear Technology University, complete with (and this may be my favorite Muthservation of all): an NCAA basketball team. (Muth suggests we name them the "Fighting Neutrons." With respect, I think we can do better with the Name-ology and shall proceed to think of ideas.) Oh yes, one more thing. All of this would likely lead to the necessity for a four-lane super highway connecting Yucca Mountain with Las Vegas and Reno (wouldn't THAT be nice), plus enough extra money to build enough roads to solve all our other gridlock problems.

Note/Update: a Yucca Facts reader, Bruce Jackson, pointed out that another benefit could be a major hydrogen production station/distribution system making Nevada a world leader in motor vehicles (and other power-using things) that use hydrogen fuel cell technology. Many believe this is the future of New Energy (and that bio-fuels are not, which now also seems to be the consensus of the entire world in light of recent food shortages/rising food prices).