“At this point it would be difficult to revive the project,” Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard University, told Jeff Tollefson at Nature. “All of the people who were working on this project have moved on, and they have new jobs.”
Really, that was always the goal. President Obama has given environmentalists their own "Mission Accomplished" feel-good moment. He has defied federal court orders to make a decision while continuing to "study" the issue, assuming that people would get other jobs. So even when yet another science study found that it is safe, and the best solution for nuclear waste storage, as just happened, the issue would be off the table in a practical sense.
Unsurprisingly, the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
still recommends against it despite the science consensus for decades. Why wouldn't they? President Obama appointed an anti-Yucca mountain activist with no expertise in nuclear power to run the NRC. Then Kevin Knobloch, a journalist, environmental activist and former Democrat staffer who really helped Democrats when he became head of the Union of Concerned Scientists lobbying group, got picked to be Chief of Staff of the Energy Department for Dr. Ernie Moniz. One of the cornerstones of UCS is being against most science, but especially nuclear science ("Nuclear power is an inherently hazardous technology") and they even conspired with the NRC to write a report "critical" of the NRC on nuclear oversight, so it was no surprise that their key political operative got rewarded with a job working in the Department of Energy, as the Gatekeeper against nuclear power.
The administration trumpets its "all of the above" approach to energy policy but has made a strategy of announcing new nuclear fact-finding efforts while choking off funding for existing projects. That will make sure nothing ever gets done - just like with Yucca Mountain.
Democrats were critical of Republican President George W. Bush because a ship returning from duty had a 'mission accomplished' banner and they spun that to mean a declaration that the war in the mid-east was over. Democrats have their own mission accomplished bragging rights now - they have set science back decades once again.
But fans of science have not given up, even if it seems a little Quixotic at this point. Yucca Mountain will be here long after Harry Reid is gone, they have noted. And there is some truth to that. If a Republican takes over in 2017 and replaces Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists anti-nuclear activists with people who actually have degrees in nuclear energy, it could get started again.
Republicans seem to prefer people who know what they are talking about when it comes to energy. For Democrats, having a degree in nuclear science is a bad thing when it comes to nuclear science. They don't want "insiders" in charge. To neutral people, that mentality is as weird as putting someone from the Discovery Institute in charge of evolutionary biology grants at the National Science Foundation.
