Utopists again....

This bit from Jonah Goldberg's readers on the Yucca Mountian stuck my funny bone.

Jonah:
As a long-time Nevada resident I've spent a decade trying to bang into the
heads of Nevada politicians (and people who will actually listen) that there is
an opportunity to turn Yucca Mountain into a boom for Nevada. Just agree
to stop opposing the facility in exchange for an industry-funded reprocessing
facility at the site.

Reprocessing is currently outlawed in the US due to a Jimmy Carter
presidential edict. Repeal it! It was intended to prevent nuclear
proliferation. Ha! Even your couch knows how well that has worked.Reprocessing
would break down the spent fuel rods, remove the plutonium (about 3% of each
rod) then reprocess the remaining U235 and U238 into new rods. The
technology is well known - it was invented here, and the French have been
doing it for years.

Incidentally, the opponents always cite the size of the nuclear waste
problem in terms of weight - 78,000 tons sounds like a lot. But don't forget
Uranium and Plutonium are among the heaviest of minerals - a ton of this stuff
is approximately 1 cubic foot in volume. All of it would fit into a football
field, end zone to end zone in a pile stacked 5.2 feet high. About halfway up to
the goalposts. And the 3% that needs to be sequestered (the Plutonium)
amounts to 2340 cubic feet. Of course that has to be broken into
smaller pieces and vitrified (encased in molten glass), but the point is, its a
solvable problem.

Emphasis added.

Wow.... so we have Jimmy Carter (an obstensible nuclear engineer) banning a process heavily used by the French that recycles nuclear fuel. So not only are our reactors that much more inefficient but this is responsible for what 30 times more waste being around?

Once again the greens prefer their utopian ideology to processes that acutally make things safer and more efficient.

Just like how the EPA won't let skimmers that simply filter out oil work in the Gulf. Why? Because the water they dump overboard has too much oil in it. You see it's far better to mandate a near pefect 99.9985% purity than actually... filter at a 99% purity, but at a much higher rate.

Then again there's a lot that could be done to help clean up the spill.

So much more. Read and see if this sounds like the actions of an administration that actually wants this thing cleaned up, or is even capable of it.

But hey, maybe if the President gets his Energy Tax, he'll let the prols clean up the mess.