All That Nuclear Waste And Now Hole to Bury It In

Jim Rosen of McClatchy’s DC Bureau reports that Congress is worried that the Obama Administration’s decision to shutter Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository could delay a new generation of nuclear reactors from coming on line.

Obama has come out for nuclear power in a big way by offering up hefty govertment guaranteed loans to power companies that want to build new nuclear plants. Now another Obama policy, largely designed by the West Wing politicos to keep Harry Reid in the Senate by abandoningYucca Mountain as a waste storage site despite large amounts of Department of Energy money being put into the facility.  For more go here.

Aiken, South Carolina’s job machine

Aiken, South Carolina’s job machine – the Deopartment of Energy’s huge Savannah River Site where in ther 1950’s 40,000 people made plutonium and now 14,000 are trying to clean it up seems to have some old fashioned Southern racial  problems.

The Aiken Standard reportrs that Savannah Rive Site employee  Christy L. Johnson is suing her contractor employer claiming she was discriminated against because of her race, and according to the article “ seems to have the backing of the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.”

The site has a long history of discrimination and racial problems. Johnson, who is African American, claims she was passed over for for promotions that went to less qualified white women.

The project Johnson was working on is called the Mixed Oxide Facility and is years behind scheduled and now topping $10 billion in costs. For more go here.

Tomb of Toxins: Part III: Unearthing the Toxic Tomb

As a mustard yellow bulldozer about the size of a Jeep Rubicon rumbles forward and reverses hurling dirt into the air, cars rattle down Earhart Boulevard in New Orleans. The spring sun beams down baking six construction workers in neon yellow vests and white hard hats as they prepare to concrete the gutted neutral ground. Greg Dabalos, a concrete finisher from Command Construction Industries based out of Metairie, La., says his company did not tell him what used to exist on the grassy parcel across the street in this mainly black community. But before he could respond to additional questions, an employee from the construction company exited a truck and crossed the street directing all inquiries to their office.

Unlike Dabalos, long-time residences of Gert Town know what occupied this barren lot surrounded by a five and a half-foot barbed wire fence. They blame activities that occurred there for damaging their health – causing cancer, respiratory problems and other adverse effects. And a class action suit by neighbors against companies that made and stored an arsenal of lethal chemicals there – including DDT and toxic dry-cleaning fluids – tore the community apart.

“The real bad time of the operation was during the Vietnam War,” says Frank Edwards, one of the lawyers who represented Gert Town residents in the class action suit against plant operators. “They actually made Agent Orange there.”